Setting up a simple Kindle book

Kendra over at WomensMemoirs.com posted an article recently that grabbed my attention. In A Merry Kindle Christmas, she pointed to Amazon’s announcement that, for the first time ever, e-books outsold print format books on Christmas Day. Wow! So Kendra’s point to her writing readers was that, while the digital publishing world is still undergoing significant shifts and changes, it’s probably time for authors to seriously consider digital as a viable publication option. Then I saw the link to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, a site that I didn’t even know existed. After clicking over to that site, my little tech-writer-desktop-publisher heart was swept away! I can’t resist an opportunity to muck around with page layout, text structure, and bookish things in general, so I decided to embark on a little experiment: how do I publish a Kindle book?

I was on a mission! I coerced a copy of friend Spencer Baum’s new book, The Demon Queen and the Locksmith, figuring if I was going to do the work it might as well pay off for someone.  So, with his Word and PDF source files, I set off to work… Here’s a very high-level summary of my afternoon playing with Kindle formatting.

Kindle books are simple HTML pages

I was actually surprised at how little proprietary code or markup is required to create a Kindle book. It really is a simple HTML document. In truth, it’s somewhat limited by that fact, as only basic tags are supported. You can’t even use tables, though the DTP site says you can use basic CSS (which they don’t elaborate on, unfortunately). I should offer a caveat here—I’ve been mucking around with HTML code for more than 10 years, so I have a very high comfort level with opening up a file and tweaking the markup. If you’re not familiar with HTML, this could be a frustrating time-sink for you.

Tools and process are important allies

The DTP site offers suggestions for several HTML editors and whatnot, but my personal magic combo is Microsoft Word and Adobe Dreamweaver. To get started, you only have to save your Word document as a web page. Word is notorious for inserting gobs of ugly extra formatting code, so if your version of Word offers a plain HTML export, take advantage of it. However, if you can’t figure out how to make Word strip out all that ugly code, Dreamweaver does a mighty fine job of it. In Dreamweaver, just use the Clean up Word HTML command and 90% of the crap is gone in moments. You will make your job hugely faster if you strip the Word tags before you do any other formatting.

One custom tag to remember

Since the files use basic HTML for formatting, you don’t need to know any special markup tags. However, there is one that I used frequently in my experiment:

<mbp:pagebreak />

This forces a page break, which is very handy for the front matter and at the end of a chapter.

Images need some massaging

The Kindle is a black-and-white screen, so I encourage you to tweak your graphics before including them in your Kindle package. For example, the Demon Queen uses a black cover with red, white, and gray colors. If I had uploaded that color file, the resulting Kindle image would have had very low contrast. So I used PhotoShop to convert the file to grayscale, then I increased the brightness and decreased the contrast so the image looked better on the Kindle screen.

Upload and preview

Always, always, always preview your work! There are a couple of ways to accomplish this—if possible, take advantage of both. If you have a Kindle, you can send your file directly to your device using email (check the settings of your device—it’s likely something like name@kindle.com) or via the USB cable. Keep in mind that email delivery of documents carries a small fee (details here on the Amazon.com site).

You can also preview your file on the DTP site by creating an item on your bookshelf. In my case, since it wasn’t my book to sell, I didn’t bother filling out all the metadata and purchase info, I just skipped directly to the “Upload & Preview” tab. I uploaded several different versions with ease, then just deleted the project when I was done testing.

Resources from the DTP site

Here is the only info I needed to create this first Kindle file. I’m sure there are tons more tricks and tips, but it was actually quite simple (again, considering my familiarity with HTML coding) to create a simple Kindle book.

• DTP: Supported HTML tags
• DTP: Custom tags (including that ever-so-important page break)
• DTP: Using full-screen images
• DTP: Formatting tips (with very basic CSS info)
• DTP: Upload and preview

Tagged as: Books, Kindle, tips