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First time writing an ebook for Kindle - Newbie needs help/is confused!

by MovingAround
19 replies
Hi warriors!

I am trying to publish a book on Kindle and I have written the book on MS Word (2010). I have written each chapter on a different Word document although the chapters and content are not formatted fully, it's just huge blocks of test with as I just wrote and wrote until I finished the book and I need to give it a good format/organization. My problem is that I have spent all these months writing the manuscript and I am just looking now at to how to publish it on Amazon, and the more I read, the more confused I am!!

For starters, I have read that the best text editor to use to publish on Kindle is either Sigil or Calibre, can anyone please confirm this?

As I say, the manuscript (book) is all plain text for now and not well organized, I want to edit and possibly write a bit more with the new editor (Sigil/Calibre). I have read that either Sigil or Calibre are the editors to use which allow to publish the book to .epub and then from .epub to .mobi. Is it like this, first save it as .epub then save it as .mobi?

The above approach is one of the few that I have scouted. Apparently using Sigil is best because .epub is the format used by other online publishers so that I could put my book on other publishing platforms. The .epub is then transformed to .mobi, although I still have to figure this out how (anyone?).

I am reading from different guides that when transforming from .epub to .mobi, sometimes there are problems and the Table of Contents (ToC) is messed up, which adds more drama to all of this.

My book is non-fiction (unrelated to IM, has to do with a hobby of mine) and I need to put up a few Excel tables too which I read is best to have them saved as .jpeg . The book is about 150 pages long, some 75,000 words. To make it easier for those who could help me, my questions are:

1) What's the next editing program to use after having written the manuscript in MS Word?

2) Is the described approach the best? I have read about saving the Word manuscript as .html instead and then using another program to edit and save as .mobi

3) If using Sigil or Calibre for 1), am I right in thinking that these 2 programs only save to .epub and don't save to .mobi?

4) What would be the next program to use to convert the .epub to .mobi?

5) What is the best program to view the final .mobi? I have downloaded KindleGen but for some reason it is not working on my PC (I have Vista). I have read that the best way is to actually buy a Kindle and test the book there but I am spending good money on having a good cover so this is not an option as I know others do fine without testing their book first with a Kindle.

As you can see, I am confused and have spent the last days trying to understand how to do it on my own. I have downloaded Sigil and have started copy & pasting the blocks of text but don't want to take it too far yet until I know for sure that using Sigil, saving as .epub and then saving as .mobi is the best approach.

Thank you so much to all!

Cheers
#confused #ebook #help or is #kindle #newbie #time #writing
  • Profile picture of the author KEKilpatrick
    You might check out the link below (I'm not an affialate). I haven't tried this yet but have read some really good reviews.

    Good luck

    Kevin

    http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...-training.html
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  • Profile picture of the author travlinguy
    Keep it in Word. Format it the way it should look as a book. Save it in Word as a Web page. Then put it in the Kindle previewer to see what it looks like. That's it. Make adjustments as needed and upload it. It's easy.
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    • Profile picture of the author The Real Deal
      Keep it simple the first time around and keep it in Word...it will be fine.

      If you send me a PM with your email address I can send you a pre-formatted Word template that you can just copy and paste your text, book cover and chapter titles into. It will then look perfect in Kindle with internal links to your chapters that work in Kindle etc.

      Simple is better if it actually gets done!
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  • Profile picture of the author Adie
    I published my first ebook 2 days ago and formatted through MSword 2003 without any problem...
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Thompson
    You're a writer. Spent your time writing. Hire someone to format and convert to .mobi and epub for you. There are plenty of freelancers who do this for a living.
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  • Profile picture of the author goindeep
    Go look at this: http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...-training.html
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  • Profile picture of the author LilBlackDress
    I use a template designed for Kindle in Word and then a simple formatting tool which adds a TOC, gets rid of line breaks etc. This also turns it into a .mobi file which I upload to Amazon.

    In one book I wanted to include Excel spreadsheets so hosted them on one of my websites and included a link to them in the book.
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  • Profile picture of the author thebalroc
    Its seems kindle is good place to be right now...
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  • Profile picture of the author DeeAnkary
    Couple of other things to add:

    - For the tables-converted-images, make sure to compress and reduce the size as much as you can. You get charged for large files.

    - Also for the images, make sure they are make sense in black and white, as the bulk of the Kindle owner are on the older, B/W devices.

    - After you're done formatting your book in Word, go to word2cleanhtml dot com to clean up all of the crazy HTML Word bloats your document with. You can then take the resulting html to Calibre to convert to EPUB, MOBI, PDF etc

    Finally, don't stress too much about it. Get it out and on sale, and remember you can always make changes and republish!

    Good luck.
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  • Profile picture of the author DianaHeuser
    Originally Posted by MovingAround View Post


    2) Is the described approach the best? I have read about saving the Word manuscript as .html instead and then using another program to edit and save as .mobi

    Cheers
    MovingAround,

    When you have created the document in MS Word and you are happy with the formatting, do as Travlinguy suggested and preview it in Kindle Previewer.

    If it looks ok, then you zip the html files up and then upload that to Amazon. They then do the conversion for you and it works fine.

    Drop me a message if you are still battling.

    Di
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    • Profile picture of the author MovingAround
      First of all, thank you all who have chipped in.

      Originally Posted by travlinguy View Post

      Keep it in Word. Format it the way it should look as a book. Save it in Word as a Web page. Then put it in the Kindle previewer to see what it looks like. That's it. Make adjustments as needed and upload it. It's easy.
      You see, this is the first approach I read but then I read of people complaining that you needed to mess around with html coding and that this approach just messed everything. I then read of using a WYSIWYG editor (Sigil/Calibre) as a better option, even though these editors do not ensure WYSIWYG for the final version of the kindle!

      I rather do this (your) approach to be honest. Thing is, I have read that there are certain things that one must avoid such as bullet points and hyphens (-), which is very inconvenient as I use hyphens a lot as my writing is casual/friendly to the reader.

      I have downloaded the PDF document in the Amazon Kindle site, is that enough then as a guide to publish the book as per this approach (save Word doc to html)?


      Originally Posted by The Real Deal View Post

      Keep it simple the first time around and keep it in Word...it will be fine.

      If you send me a PM with your email address I can send you a pre-formatted Word template that you can just copy and paste your text, book cover and chapter titles into. It will then look perfect in Kindle with internal links to your chapters that work in Kindle etc.

      Simple is better if it actually gets done!
      Will send you a PM with email address. Trusting you with it so please don't spam it


      Originally Posted by Adie View Post

      I published my first ebook 2 days ago and formatted through MSword 2003 without any problem...
      Care to briefly elaborate on how you did it? Did you use the html approach? Also, I assume you saved it to .doc not .docx?


      Originally Posted by Chris Thompson View Post

      You're a writer. Spent your time writing. Hire someone to format and convert to .mobi and epub for you. There are plenty of freelancers who do this for a living.
      This! I have spent every day for the last almost year writing the book and it looks great in that not only the idea is unique but I found myself actually enjoying the writing. I already own a few websites and have a established fanbase, and my fans dig my style so writing a book was the next step.

      If only it were as easy as saving it as a PDF LOL!!

      Originally Posted by LilBlackDress View Post

      I use a template designed for Kindle in Word and then a simple formatting tool which adds a TOC, gets rid of line breaks etc. This also turns it into a .mobi file which I upload to Amazon.

      In one book I wanted to include Excel spreadsheets so hosted them on
      one of my websites and included a link to them in the book.
      Yep, I thought of including links. I haven't used a Kindle in my life nor did I know what it was until I thought of writing a book. So including links is a good option to help the reader in getting the most out of the book?

      Also, care to share the tools you used or approach you used? Thanks.


      Originally Posted by thebalroc View Post

      Its seems kindle is good place to be right now...
      Don't know man. While Amazon has gone far in helping fight spam and nowadays having a book published on Amazon means that at least it is not a PLR or a piece of crap, Amazon has also taught the consumer to buy books for a few mere dollars.

      I have poured my soul into this book in that I have really worked it hard and I care for my readers and want them to benefit from it. I am proud of the book and what I have done, yet I can only mark it up to 9.99 USD to make the most of royalties, when personally I would price it as something like 19.99 and I know my readers would buy it for that. Unfortunately Amazon's 30/70 royalty scheme means that I would have to put it at 20 something USD to get the same royalty as 9.99.

      I am considering writing more books and what I will do is have a shopping cart for PDF versions too. However, for now, I just want to put this book on autopilot at Amazon.
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      • Profile picture of the author MovingAround
        Originally Posted by DeeAnkary View Post

        Couple of other things to add:

        - For the tables-converted-images, make sure to compress and reduce the size as much as you can. You get charged for large files.

        - Also for the images, make sure they are make sense in black and white, as the bulk of the Kindle owner are on the older, B/W devices.

        - After you're done formatting your book in Word, go to word2cleanhtml dot com to clean up all of the crazy HTML Word bloats your document with. You can then take the resulting html to Calibre to convert to EPUB, MOBI, PDF etc

        Finally, don't stress too much about it. Get it out and on sale, and remember you can always make changes and republish!

        Good luck.
        Awesome and thanks!

        About the tables, shall I take a screenshot of it and save it as jpeg? This is what I initially thought of doing, how would you go about it?

        When I copy & pasted text from Word to Sigil, it put in the html code the annoying <div> thing. I have had this happening in my sites when I transfer text from Word to my articles. Can I ask, what on earth is this <div> thing? All I know is that it messes the format of everything in html. When I saw the <div> thing on Sigil I almost slapped the laptop!


        Originally Posted by DianaHeuser View Post

        MovingAround,

        When you have created the document in MS Word and you are happy with the formatting, do as Travlinguy suggested and preview it in Kindle Previewer.

        If it looks ok, then you zip the html files up and then upload that to Amazon. They then do the conversion for you and it works fine.

        Drop me a message if you are still battling.

        Di
        Thanks. When Amazon does the conversion, do you have the ability to have a last look or would they automatically publish it? I really want to have a last look to what my readers would be reading. I am a bit OCD when it comes to this.

        Can I ask you all: about the possibility of having someone doing the formatting for the book instead, my main worry is having my work plagiarized. How would I be assured that whoever I hand in my work to doesn't copy it and do something with it? I would essentially be giving this person the book ready for publishing and make money. Perhaps I am worrying too much but as a webmaster, I have seen some nasty cases of plagiarism.
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  • Profile picture of the author MovingAround
    Got your message Diana.

    Just bumping the questions, I'd appreciate anyone chipping in. Thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author colinph970
    you can get a free copy of my formatting guide which shows you exactly how to do the formatting step by step..........very easy once you know how.

    Free copy at:

    Enter Your Details to Join Our FREE Kindle Writers Course! | Providing E-Books For All E-Book Readers………
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  • Profile picture of the author PublishPro
    If you are a professional writer, please don't do experiment of formatting book poorly. This will make bad impression to the readers and they will surely leave negative review of your book. You can hire someone professional for this.

    Regarding Sigil and Calibre:
    Sigil is to create ePub
    Calibre is to convert that epub to .Mobi (kindle) and vice versa, and yes, sometimes the converted book look messy. You can try learning HTML5 to do it the way you like it. You can also use Adobe inDesign to convert your manuscript to kindle. For this, you will have to install kindle plugin for inDesign and then import your document to indesign and then export it to kindle after properly setting it.

    If you need more help, PM me and I will guide you about the whole process.
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  • Profile picture of the author PublishingMadeEz
    Publishing to the Kindle is not tough once you know the steps. Formatting your book is the toughest part but it in itself is not hard to do. There are many good guides out there to show you how.
    I have personally written a step by step guide book for publishing your book on Kindle, NOOK and Create Space. If you want more information send me a message and I'd be more than happy to help you out.
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  • Profile picture of the author JamieSEO
    Originally Posted by MovingAround View Post

    My book is non-fiction (unrelated to IM, has to do with a hobby of mine) and I need to put up a few Excel tables too which I read is best to have them saved as .jpeg . The book is about 150 pages long, some 75,000 words. To make it easier for those who could help me, my questions are:

    1) What's the next editing program to use after having written the manuscript in MS Word?

    2) Is the described approach the best? I have read about saving the Word manuscript as .html instead and then using another program to edit and save as .mobi

    3) If using Sigil or Calibre for 1), am I right in thinking that these 2 programs only save to .epub and don't save to .mobi?

    4) What would be the next program to use to convert the .epub to .mobi?

    5) What is the best program to view the final .mobi? I have downloaded KindleGen but for some reason it is not working on my PC (I have Vista). I have read that the best way is to actually buy a Kindle and test the book there but I am spending good money on having a good cover so this is not an option as I know others do fine without testing their book first with a Kindle.
    Write and format your main book (text and images) in Word and save as a .DOC file, NOT .docx.

    With your images make sure they are either above or below text, not beside it.

    Do not use any tables, instead convert them to images.

    The reason that tables should be images, and images should be above or below text = on a Kindle reader you can resize the text when viewing, which totally screws up formatting of tables and images that are in line with text.

    4) What would be the next program to use to convert the .epub to .mobi?

    Kindle Previewer
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