Self Publishing – Step 1. Format

Posted by Ironspike on Feb 7, 2011 in General, Writing | 0 comments

Self Publishing – Step 1.  Format

As I said in a pervious post I wasn’t out to try and publish my works. That changed last year when I started writing some material and couldn’t stop. I was on a writing high (if there is such a thing). Material just flowed out of me and on to paper (more accurately –  MS Word). When I stopped I had A LOT of material.

Then like a brick – it hit me – ‘I think other folks would like this!’

That was when my journey of self publishing really took off. I wasn’t going to ‘print’ my material myself – I needed an electronic format. My options would be to go with an online solution such as Amazon or one of the other online eBook providers.

I did some research and it seemed logical to me to go with Amazon. In my mind since Amazon sold the number one e-reader on the planet – that going with them would be the best route. Now a lot has changed in the e-book world since then, more companies have entered the market, Amazon changed up it’s royalty programs, etc.

However, I still decided to stick with Amazon for my choice of e-book publishing.

This brings me into format of an e-book. My number one concern was getting my book that was in MSword format into a readable e-book.

I found several ways to do this:

1. Upload a supported file and have Amazon convert it for you.
2. Use Amazon’s Kindlegen.exe and create your own e-book and upload it.
3. Create an e-book in a supported format that Amazon can convert.

After reading countless conversion horror stories on the Amazon KDP forums – I decided that I would use Kindlegen.exe and convert and create my e-book myself.

This turned out to be a big pain in my ass but well worth it.

In a nutshell Kindlegen.exe will take a group of files (html files mostly) and convert them into a e-book with the *.mobi extensions. These files are natively handled on the Kindle which means they could just be dragged and dropped on to the device to proof.

The .mobi files are also used on mobile devices and mobi readers too. Using an html editor I started the long task of converting my MSWORD file into html. I found it easier for me to create multiple html files – by breaking the book apart by chapter. The mobi format requires a toc and .prc file too. These files help in navigation of chapters.

I would use Kindlegen.exe to combine all these into a e-book. At the time I didn’t have a kindle but I was able to open up the file locally on my desktop with the kindle app. It wasn’t until after Christmas when I got my Kindle that I actually was able to read my e-book in it’s final form.

Now, I think I went the hard way by controlling every aspect of my e-book creation. However, at least I know it’s presented in the EXACT way I think it should be.