Preparing a Book for Kindle

After a good deal of trial and error, I learned many things about preparing a manuscript for Kindle Direct Publishing:

• Get the 2012 free eBook from Amazon, "Building Your Book for Kindle."  It helps prepping your mss, but it does NOT have the latest, best information.

• Write in MS-Word, save as HTML using "Web page, filtered"

• Drop HTML file on icon of downloadable Kindle Previewer

• Use Kindle Previewer to get warnings—just click on the double-down arrow icon after your file is converted to read any warnings.  You need to know a little HTML, but the warnings are fairly clear.  Use the warnings to help guide clean-up in MS-Word.

• Kindle Previewer also has link to location of final file—but they are much larger than your final file will be.  In my case, 5.5MB vs. 1.17MB.

• Good to do non-photographic pictures like tables and graphs as  .GIFs that are less than 127kb.  About 750x750 pixels max.  You can also put an HTML command near the anchor point to make it 100% wide, but I find it's better just to rely on readers to click the images to blow them up for viewing on the higher resolution Kindle models.

• For later versions of your book, after you get no warnings from the stand-alone Previewer, do NOT convert to HTML.  You can put a .doc into the KDP uploader and it will do your NCX for you.  Great info here. 

• Although some claim the downloadable stand-alone previewer is more accurate, I have not found that to be the case in late 2015.  The KDP online post-upload previewer is better and the upload files are much smaller and more accurate vs. the standalone Previewer, which uses Kindlegen to make their files.  The standalone Previewer is a bit quicker, but it produces both KF8 and KF9 mobi files which are HUGE.

• You don't have to zip HTML and Images together when you upload a .doc file.

• Bullets work, you just want to be consistent and not use one of the other formats—there are too many alternatives in MS-Word.  I customized my bullet format and used that consistently throughout to minimize the over-done or under-done indentation on bullets on different Kindle devices—they should be consistent, but they aren’t.  Check your book on all devices.

• Unless you were super careful about getting rid of any alternative bullet formatting, one or two bullet "pictures" (the things used at the start of a bullet point) may appear after conversion to HTML in the separate images folder.  I still have one I just delete before uploading my book.  I even looked in the HTML code for a reference to the image file but it is not there.

• There are 5 main Kindle models (Voyager, DX [aka PaperWhite or whatever it's called], Fire HD, Fire HDX, Fire HDX 8.9) plus Android phone, iOS devices, and one Kid Kindle model.

• No need for getting an ISBN for your book; Amazon will assign their own number.

• No need to copyright registration, but do include symbol.

• Paragraph marks may sneak to the left of the left margin, if you ever un-indented a bulleted text selection.  If you get that warning after converting to HTML, then make all characters visible (Tools / Options / View / Formatting Marks, check box next to "All") and look for them.

• Don't use free 3^rd party templates.  Just use Heading 1 for chapters, and an internal book mark at TOC called "toc".  I have been building TOCs in MS-Word for years so it's second nature to me, but you might want to review how to do that.  Make sure you right-click the TOC and select "update field" before uploading to KDP.

• Make sure you do not have any "smallcaps" fonts.  KDP does not like those.  Some free templates have those.  Kindle templates are often wrong.

• Don't pay anybody to format a book, unless you're rich and have no time--just expect over 100 uploads / previews / edit cycles as you proof your book.

• Calibre and Sigil are not needed to prepare your book, if you're only going to sell through KDP.  KDP does not use the EPUB file format which those 2 free editors produce.

• HTML filtered files accept boxes around paragraphs, but not around characters/words.  You might have to select all of your text and de-box, using "apply to text" not "apply to paragraph" to get rid of lingering boxes around just spaces.  HTML might see some single spaces as boxed, but MS-Word will not show it.