Ultimate Ebook Creator Review - Formatting for Kindle Made Easy

Recently on Affilorama, we have been featuring a number of webinars on creating, promoting and selling Kindle books; but one of the complaints we hear time and again from users is the trouble they have formatting their ebooks for Kindle. Because of this, they have given up on marketing through it; which is a wasted opportunity. Mark Ling is a big fan of Kindle and is regularly making thousands of dollars off of sales. Ebooks are nothing new; but thanks to Kindle they have now become a mainstream product that the average user is happy to purchase. Kindle has “legitimized” the ebook market, and with the market still wide open it is the perfect opportunity to share your knowledge with the world – and make plenty of money along the way. That is why we are very excited by a recent product launched; Ultimate Ebook Creator.

 

What is Ultimate Ebook Creator?

It is a software tool that lets you easily create ebooks to publish and upload to the web. In particular, it is optimized to be used with Kindle and includes a number of nifty additions to make things easier for you. With the software, you can easily create:

• A home cover page
• A professional introduction page
• A table of contents that automatically lists chapters created (with a unique addition of being able to easily create segmented pages within chapters)
• Different pages, chapters and segmented pages for your ebook using the included visual editor.
• Plus lots more additions included.

Today, I am going to take you through the software and show you how easy it is to create an ebook with it.

Step 1: Adding in Book Information (+ tips on optimizing for SEO)

The book information will automatically generate the meta data that Kindle needs to add your book to their database. Does that sound scary? Well, with Ultimate Ebook Creator, it isn’t. All you need to do is click on the ‘Book Information’ tab and fill in the different sections.

PRO TIP: This information is very important when optimizing your ebook for the Kindle search engines. Make sure that your book description includes keywords and phrases that people will be searching for when trying to find ebooks. Be sure to include these in the keywords box as well.

One thing we noticed is that there was no “enter” button included in this page; which made it a bit confusing for us as we didn’t know if the information would be saved if we navigated away from the tab. It turns out the information is saved, and this is a very small quibble.

Step 2: Add a Book Cover Image

This is as simple as simple gets. Simply use the upload dialogue to upload an image which will be your book cover image, and the program does the rest for you.

PRO TIP: We recommend that your image be 600x800 pixels as this is the size that Kindle is optimized for.

Confusingly, the program does not tell you this when uploading it, but this mentioned in the Ultimate Ebook Creator training documents and videos. Another thing we wished it would do is automatically resize images that are too big. However, to compensate they include a video which gives you an overview of how to use GIMP (a free graphics editing software tool) to create a image that is 600x800 pixels. The video is very good, very clear and easy to understand. Again, this is a very small quibble and it is very easy to create an image that is the right size.

Step 3: Create a Title Page

You may have noticed that professional ebooks usually include a title page with legal and copyright information. This protects your content from intellectual thief, and something we recommend that all authors and publishers include. To make things even easier for you, Ultimate Ebook Creator automatically generates this for you. All you need to do is fill in your information and you are done.

Step 4: Add Content & Generate a Table of Contents

Adding a page is very easy, and this is where the software really shines. Underneath the ‘Table of Contents’ tab, simply right click and select the ‘Add Chapter’ option from the menu. In the dialogue box that opens, input your chapter title. You will then be taken back to the main software dialogue, where you can input your content into the visual editor box.

The visual editor box is fantastic; one thing that has been frustrating publishers for a lot time when uploading to Kindle is that their ebooks are often rejected because of formatting issues. Ultimate Ebook Creator is optimized for this and all of the formatting options are Kindle-friendly. You can bold text, add italics, underline words, add bullet points, create indents, add pictures and more. To make things even easier the text is automatically set to Arial and is size 12 by default; this is the recommended settings for Kindle and looks great when published.

Your Table of Contents page is automatically generated, and it creates clickable links so that you can skip directly to the different chapters. You can create unlimited chapters; and within those chapters you can create segmented sections. These are part of the chapters; and they will appear indented blow the chapter as clickable links. It is very easy to create and it lets you organize your ebook for your readers.

Step 5: Generate your Ebook & Upload it to Kindle

Simply click export, and select to export it to the Kindle format; .mobi – it will then save it in this format for you. All you need to do then is to submit it to Kindle on their website, and you are done!

Pros:

• Easily create and generate Kindle ebooks; the streamlined process is great for beginners that need help creating ebooks ready for Kindle, and advanced users that want a software tool that will make creating ebooks faster and easier than manually.
• Content is added using visual editor boxes, making it easy to design your pages to look exactly as you want them to look without code.
• Makes formatting for Kindle easy.
• Easy meta data boxes, so that you can optimize your ebook for Kindle’s search engine and be found by users.
• Lots of other great additions; some of these include the ability to create segments within chapters, the article database tool, a host of training material/videos and more – all included as part of the package.

Cons:

• Some parts of it can be initially confusing; for example, we didn’t immediately know that we could navigate away from a tab and we hadn’t missed the “save” button.
• It does not automatically resize cover images to Kindle’s specifications.
• What we would love is for each chapter to have a “preview” button where we can see what it would look like on a Kindle-sized screen/resolution.

Conclusion?

The team at Affilorama were really impressed by Ultimate Ebook Creator. It streamlines the process it make it easier for beginners, and faster for advanced users. The visual editor’s features are optimized to work with Kindle, and so you shouldn’t get any more of those frustrating Kindle formatting issues and have your book rejected. Be prepared to watch the training videos and read the material; I highly recommend the videos. They are very easy to watch, are very clear and outline what to do. With them, you’ll be up and running with your first ebook on Kindle’s marketplace in no time.