The newest eBook we are selling, Storage Unit Auction Riches, is our first attempt at also offering it for the Kindle eBook reader. I thought it would be a snap converting a .docx or .pdf to the Kindle format, but it turns out it was hard than I thought.
First of all, don’t blindly trust the Amazon Kindle conversion routine that kicks off when you upload your book. Even thought they support various formats for upload, it really doesn’t do a good job of converting those.
I downloaded a program called Calibre, a free piece of software that converts .pdf and .docx to multiple other formats like .MOBI, ePub, .RTF, and .TXT. It worked great and has a great interface, but it still did not fully convert it to a good looking Kindle format. For example, I tried converting the .pdf version of the eBook. The .pdf had page numbers and a header, which looked really bad when converted to .MOBI.
Finally after a full day of trial and error, I decided to convert the book to HTML (one of the dozens of recommended formats, according to Amazon). I removed all graphics and left references in the book that point to a website that houses the images. When the conversion was done, I tried it again.
This time, the conversion looked really good! It still has some minor page break and spacing issues, but nothing major. I’m sure if I spent more time with it, I’ll find the best way to do it.
I did some more research and found another tool called Jutoh. It cost about $30, but man was it worth it. The chapter editing, the conversion and file checking, and the multiple output formats made the conversion job very easy. The next couple of books I did I used this tool and it saved me so much time. The books come out formatted perfectly for Kindle aqnd Nook, as well as web-ready HTML. If you can spend the $30, I highly recommend this tool.
If you would like more information on helpful tools that make publishing your eBooks even easier, check out these links...
UPDATE: Please read this next post for updated information.
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