AUTHOR TIPS: How to download a mobi file from Amazon

I've been a writer long enough now to know what I don't know. And that's a lot. But I've also been a writer long enough to pick up a few tips here and there that I find other authors don't know. So today I'm starting a new series of Author Tips. Some will be short, some will be long, but each will be some little thing that I've discovered along the way that might be helpful. Today we start with how to download a mobi file from Amazon - that you can then send to others. 

"Can you send me a review copy of the book?"

It's a fairly straightforward question that crops up a lot - but for some authors, the answer is "um... I don't know!"

Well, if your book is an ebook on Amazon, the answer should be yes. It's pretty easy - though not as obvious as it could be on Amazon's interface. 

Let's walk through it. Your first step should be to go to the Kindle Direct Publishing site - that's 

https://kdp.amazon.com/ and it's where you will have uploaded your book to Amazon. Sign in and you should see a screen like this: 

Underneath will be listed your books - go to the book you want to get a mobi file for and find this button: 

Click on the three little dots and you should see this sub-menu appear: 

Click on Edit eBook Content. Now when you scroll down the content section, you'll see an area with the heading Kindle eBook Preview. There's a screenshot below to show you what to look for. 

Where it says Preview on your computer, you'll need to pop down that little section so you can see it in full detail - and the bit I've circled in red? Click on that and it'll download a copy of the mobi file onto your computer. It'll likely be in your Downloads folder when it's done, unless you've specified it should save elsewhere. 

And that's it. Simple as that. You can do similar for a pdf if you've published the book as a paperback - again, there's an option to download a pdf version from the preview section under paperback content, but I'll cover that more in another blog post discussing paperback publication. 

Once you have the mobi file, you can convert it into an epub file with a simple, free program called Calibre, but again we'll cover that another time. 

So there you are, the first Author Tips article on Altered Instinct - I hope it helped!