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How to write content for Amazon Kindle

Posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 3:19 PM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

If you plan to port your content to Amazon’s popular reader, read this guide to writing for Kindle by Jakob Nielsen.

According to Nielsen, writing for Kindle is a mishmash of writing for print, the web and mobile devices:

• Print guidelines for body text
• Web guidelines for headlines and summaries
• Mobile guidelines for page design and interaction

Linear body text and literal headlines

Unlike writing for the web, writing body text for Kindle should be more linear—think novels and magazine articles, which Nielsen says work best on Kindle. Avoid heavily hyperlinked content, as Kindle isn’t designed to navigate it well.

While body text should follow print guidelines, headlines should follow web guidelines—keep them literal, and remember that people will often read them out of context.

Finally, Nielsen recommends that if you’re trying to sell a book through Kindle, consider front-loading your best material into the first chapter, because you can then give it away as a preview to encourage sales.

More comprehensive Kindle content guidelines should no doubt become available soon. But with growing adoption of new mobile devices (such as iPhones and netbooks), the most important guideline to remember is this: always write for the medium.

As Nielsen admonishes: “For Kindle, it’s certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can’t repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle.”

Tags: Amazon Kindle, copywriting, usability