Making the ebook

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book_cover.jpg

I spent most of last week prepping and uploading the Kindle version of Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy to Amazon. Since I am not an e-reader kind of guy, I had no clue as to what I was aiming for. Here is what I’ve learned:

  • I spent a day revamping the text in Word, carefully creating, updating, and applying styles to chapter heads, text, etc., so that Kindle readers would see what the book readers saw. DO NOT BOTHER. Kindles and other e-readers have their limited, built-in fonts and layouts—nothing you’re doing will translate.

  • Kindle Create is the free software that will turn your .docx file into a Kindle file. It is a piece of crap. I would scroll down a page, and KC would jump up a page. I would click at the beginning of a paragraph to insert an image, and KC would select the first letter or word. Styles are built in and you cannot change them, nor are there styles for everything you need. Images are text-wrapped whether you want them to be or not.

  • In KC, preview the book often.

  • My nephew’s job is making ebooks for a major publisher in NYC. He recommended Calibre as software I might find useful. It would have been if I had had a year to learn it. Fun fact: your ebooks are nothing more than webpages — HMTL and CSS — and that’s what Calibre confronts you with. WYSIWYG, it is not. Maybe next time.

  • KC creates a .kfx file, which when uploaded to Amazon becomes an .azw file. It is not an epub file, which is what you’ll need to upload your book to other services like Kobo. NOTE: If you’re publishing fiction or other purely text document, you can upload a Word/.docx file directly.

  • Converting a Kindle file to an epub file is nearly impossible and is a nightmare. I’ve uploaded such a document to Kobo, and I have to warn you that it is hideous and nearly illegible. I’ll probably have to start over in iBooks Author or something.

  • Uploading to Amazon is fairly painless, but explanations are minimal. I hope I made all the right decisions, but I won’t know for sure until I discover I signed away the movie rights.

I’m sure I have more memories of the process but they’ve been suppressed. My advice? Get an agent and a publisher; make them do all the work. I’m pretty sure Stephen King doesn’t have to prep his own books. That’s my nephew’s job.

Any comments about your own experience(s)? I’d love hear your advice and fellow misery.