I attended a workshop this weekend on producing and marketing a book. There was not a whole lot on Ebooks, my chosen medium, but I was announced at the workshop as a symbol of success in selling eBooks. Not really where I want to be yet, but getting there. And I was asked a question later by one of the participants that I have been asked many times in the past, how do I format a book for sales as an eBook? This is a confusing topic for many people. I know it was for me when I first started. I sent what looked to me like a perfect Word manuscript to Amazon to be placed on their site to let their little formatting widget have a go at it. I was sure that the Kindle doc (Mobi) would also be perfect. It turned out to be anything but. My first review, of The Deep Dark Well, talked about how good the story was, then gave me three stars due to formatting problems. I looked at the book on Kindle, the novel that I thought was so perfect, and sure enough, there were a whole bunch of distracting formatting issues there. Changing fonts, changing spacing, changing indentation, sections that had lined up perfectly in the manuscript that were now all over the place. I fought with it for weeks, and correcting one problem just led to another. I bought several eBooks on how to format for Kindle, and most proved next to useless. One book even recommended copying the manuscript to Notepad, which stripped out all the formatting. Not really good for this writer, as I still like to use Italics for characters’ thoughts and names of things like ships and planets.
I read more about the problem, and found out that word processing programs leave a lot of junk formatting in the document, behind the lines and invisible when reading the document in Word. And if your use multiple programs the problem is even greater. The Deep Dark Well went through many programs; Word 2000, Word 2010, ODF, and all left their marks, like land mines waiting to spring when triggered by the proper program like Kindle Mobi. I tried Notepad++, which shows all the formatting, and there was just too much there to deal with. I tried converting on Caliber and sending that doc to Kindle, and ended up with the same problem. This was driving me crazy. I wanted a clean doc on Kindle, one in which the only mistakes were due to my shortcomings in spelling or punctuation, not due to some junk hiding behind the scenes. Instead, I was getting a mess. TDDW also would not convert well enough on Smashwords to meet their premium standards. I never did get it to work there, and just gave up on that platform.
I finally came up with a process that works, and I will discuss this for the rest of the post. First off, you need four programs. One, Wordpad, comes on almost every computer that runs Windows, so that is not a problem. The other, Word, comes on some computers and not on others. I still recommend it as a good investment. Open Org works, but it also adds too many errors for my tastes. The third program is Kindlegen, which can be downloaded from the Amazon site for free. Kindlegen will convert a Word Doc (and not Docx) to a Mobi file, which is what Kindle uses. The final program can also be downloaded at Amazon, and that is Kindle Previewer, which will allow you to look at your finished Mobi file as it will appear on Kindle devices. With these you are ready to go.
First off you want to save your Word doc in 1997-2003 document format, because the new Docx doesn’t play well with Kindle. This is also a good time to look for errors, like words that are still underlined and not changed to italics. This can be done with the find feature. Word of warning, when using find and replace make sure that the option is set for whole words only, or you can get humorous results like I did when I capitalized the word Elves and got changes like oursElves and themsElves. Also, make sure that there are not any extraneous spaces in the doc. Take out all indents made with the space bar and change to indents made with the format paragraph function. And make sure that the chapters end with page breaks, and not lots of enters. There should never be more than two consecutive blank lines created by enter in the document, as Kindle does not know how to handle them well. Now for the really easy part. Click on your doc and hit ctrl a then ctrl c, to highlight and copy the entire manuscript. Now click on the blank open Wordpad document and hit ctrl v, and the entire document will copy into Wordpad. Next repeat the process in Wordpad, ctrl a, then c, then click into a new Doc in Word and ctrl v it all in there. Wordpad will have stripped out all the unused fonts, line spacing and other things that make converting to Kindle a nightmare, while leaving indents, the font being used and italics. So now you have a Word doc that it free of all the extra HTML clutter. I would save this doc, again in 1997-2003 format, with a file name that is the name of the novel. This will show up in the header of the Kindle document, so I would name it something the reader will recognize as your book.
The next step is the conversion to an HTM doc. Now you want to convert to a Web Page, Filtered. Save this to desktop, then make sure it is closed, because Kindlegen won’t be able to convert it if the HTM doc is open in Word. Next open Kindlegen, which looks like something from a 1980s computer, a black box with a dos prompt. I have the shortcut for Kindlegen on my desktop as well, so I get to it by typing cd desktop and then hitting enter. Having Kindlegen and your document both on the desktop relieves you of the necessity of specifying paths during the conversion process. So type in kindlegen kindlegen Documentname.HTM (and putting the HTM or HTML is very important, or it won’t work). Kindlegen will now take the HTM document and convert it to mobi, which will appear on your desktop. There may be some warnings in the kindlegen box. Ignore them, as they don’t seem to mean anything. Now click on the mobi file and it will come up in Kindle Previewer. Look through the document from start to finish to see if there are any errors of formatting. This also allows you to see things you might have missed before. And when you’re satisfied with it upload the file to Amazon along with your cover, descriptions and anything else it asks for. And in twelve hours or so you will have a properly formatted book on Amazon.
Now one thing I really like about this whole process is if you find mistakes later, or they are found for you by one of your helpful reviewers, you can complete this process in minutes to upload a revised document. Surely not the only way to do it, but it works for me, and works quickly. So happy uploading.