I need your help.

Freely sharing (self) publishing advice for authors is a passion. Guess what: blogging is a job that does not pay us. The reward for hours spent behind our keyboards is delivered in the form of comments from our happy blog readers. Totally worth it.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced a new update to their Kindle Content Quality policy, which would enable readers to report problems found in their eBooks. This was met with panic in the self-publishing industry, as some blogs framed the news in a much more gory manner than was really the case. Visions of red flags and flashing warnings sprung to mind, but it is not quite that bad, yet still not great… What it is, is an opportunity for self-publishing authors to silence the naysayers, who have long bashed the industry, and assure the readers of our commitment to sharing quality content with them.

Get-rich-quick manuals online have alerted opportunists to the idea of publishing books as a means to make money in a hurry. Unfortunately, this has led to an influx of rubbish content that is poorly written and offers little to no value. Amazon, always looking to provide a better reader experience and product quality, decided to protect their assets by enabling readers to complain about poor quality eBooks. Unless your eBook is professionally edited, it may well be in the firing line.

Dear geeky reader, boy do I have a treat for you.

This post is written specially for those who are looking to upload their Microsoft Word document into Amazon's magical black box in the hope that a perfectly-formatted eBook comes out the other side. Using the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines (linked at the end of the post) you are guaranteed to get a gold-star from the eBook-review team at Amazon.