Adventures In Kindleland

I wanted to create a Kindle edition of my new novel, Opium. I had success, but it was not a task for anyone but a techie.

I figured this would be easy. I had text only, no images, no tables. I had a Microsoft Word document with just three styles (chapter heading, normal indented paragraph, normal non-indented paragraph). The Amazon Kindle Digital Text Platform was easy enough to use. I followed the steps to enter information about the novel. Then I got to the step to convert my book to Kindle format. And the fun began.

Kindle uses it own proprietary file format that works with a subset of HTML. But they have a program to convert Word files. So I uploaded my Word doc. Moments later, I was given a link to preview my converted Kindle book as it would look on a Kindle.

It was ugly. It had not picked up my paragraph formats. It had not handled a number of characters, including accented letters, the copyright symbol, and single quotes. And there were other cosmetic problems.

After trying a number of suggested approaches to fixing these issues that did not work, I finally bit the bullet and downloaded the converted HTML from the Kindle site. Then I fired up my trusty text editor and went to work on the HTML file.

Looking at the HTML, it was pretty easy to see what was wrong. So I went to work, correcting the styles, replacing symbols with HTML entities, and making other minor edits. In about an hour, I thought I had it in good shape, so I uploaded the HTML to the Kindle site. I previewed once more, spotted a few more minor issues, did one more editing pass on the HTML, and uploaded again.

I took careful notes of the steps I had taken, so I could do it again in the future more easily.

I was miffed that I had to scan through the whole book looking for glitches, not easy with a full length novel.

I was miffed that the Word doc conversion program had not handled the items I had to hand edit. Amazon's programmers could easily fix these things, which must be common problems.

Now I understand why there is an emerging cottage industry of outfits that will convert your book to Kindle format.

Now my novel is available in a Kindle edition. And I have already heard form several of my friends who ordered it for their Kindles. My small sample found more Kindle users than I would have expected, though I admit that many of my friends trend towards the techie end of the spectrum, and are early adopters of new tech gadgets.