Self-Publishing and Marketing Guidelines
Jason Boog at GalleyCat has collected links to the publishing and marketing guidelines for most of the major self-publishing outlets in his post “Free eBook Formatting & Marketing Guides for Writers.”
The post includes links to Smashwords, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble NOOK, Kobo, Apple iBooks, and Calibre in one place. If you are self-publishing or creating eBooks for someone who is, this is a nice resource.
Are these guidelines helpful to you? Is there any information that is missing? What other guidelines to you need or use?
Much of this is horribly outdated information.
The Amazon “Guidelines” link leads to an archived copy of version 1.3 (the current version is 2012.5) that is at least 3-4 years old, from the very beginning of the KDP program, and lists the maximum image file size as 63kb! (It is now either 256kb or 800kb depending on the booktype attribute). Moreover, the current version is readily available for free to anyone from Amazon’s KDP page, which the author of that post did not bother to research.
Likewise, BN’s ePub formatting guide is 2-3 years old (2010) and long out of date. It still says the “maximum viewing size” on a Nook screen is 600×730 pixels, which hasn’t been the case for over two years.
In addition, far more important than Apple’s Style Guidelines (which at least leads to an updated page) is their “iBookstore Asset Guide” which is not even listed here. This is the guide that actually explains how to format iBooks.