I'm happy to say I've gotten both Fan To Pro and Progeek Rising up at Amazon for Kindle. So of course in the interest of progeekery and self-publishing, it's time for me to tell you about my experiences of converting and publishing my book to Kindle format and Kindle itself.
The Conversion:
So first of all the choice of format for Kindle which is pretty much the Mobipocket format. There's various ways to conniver things to Mobi format, but fortunately I already had Jutoh which was a pretty nice piece of software that also let me do my ePub conversions (which I plan to talk about when they appear in the iBookstore). So I went with converting to Mobi.
In this case I'd found the best way to use Jutoh for anything was to load a MS Word file into Open Office , save it in the .ODT format, then load it in Jutoh (which takes ODT files) and save it in whatever format I needed. It'd made the conversion to ePub nearly painless, so I figured Mobipocket was easy.
I was wrong. I'm not sure if its the Mobipocket format or Jutoh (which works so well anyway) or the fact I was jumping between formats, but I had a few issues:
- Weird bookmarks showing up.
- My numbering and bullet points all had paragraph breaks after them.
The bookmarks could be deleted (though it made Progeek Rising a pain to edit), but the numbering/bullets threw me. No matter how I tweaked settings and redid things they kept getting those odd breaks. Eventually I gave up and reformatted them all by hand using straight up text as opposed to in-document formatting.
That finally worked, but it was frustrating. I want to investigate it further sometime, if only out of a mixture of rage and curiosity.
Uploading to Amazon for Kindle:
So I go to https://dtp.amazon.com/, having registered as an author when my books got there via Lulu.com. You do need to register to use the DTP (digital Text Platform) features that get your book to Kindle.
The dtp site is very slick, clean, and clear. There's plenty of help and documentation available. The creation of the book is very straightforward – so straightforward it's really had to describe it beyond "load it and fill out some fields." You have to make a decision of new ISBN (which you have to provide if you want to use one), and some royalty choices (which are straightforward), but its easy.
That's it. The books are active in one to three days depending on the time of week.
I want to write more, but honestly, it's that easy.
Conclusion:
I'll confess I got frustrated with the Mobipocket conversion, and I'm not sure why I had those odd complications. Maybe I'll figure it out in time.
I still strongly recommend Jutoh. I heard about it due to a freeware version, and it was so reasonably prices and convenient I bought it and am quite impressed. It's good for anyone wanting to do eBooks. Just remember to get Open Office to go with it.
Amazon was incredibly easy to use for Kindle publishing, very straightforward and user-friendly. The author central system allowing authors to set up profiles is nice, though the workflows are sort of odd.
So my experience going to Kindle? Frustrating in conversion, then almost too easy. I can say that it's worth doing – once you get through formatting, you get access to an audience that buys a majority of e-books out there pretty easily.
So let me know how your ventures go!