Lost in Amazon 6.5: How to Reflow Without Insanity

Yes, it's easy to make an eBook. No, it isn't at all easy to make one that actually looks like a book.

Still, I needed to try to make a text-intensive eBook using the "easy" route. 

I want to say that the extra effort is probably worth it if your work is indeed text-intensive. Something like a novel will take full advantage of the many Kindle features. Those features all add up to a great reader experience. 

Amazon is big on Reader Experience.

 Producer/author experience? Not so much.

Rather than write something just to test the method, I asked my beBee friend, Don Kerr, if I could make an eBook version of his Riding Shotgun book. It took me a couple of days to get it into a format that I could use. 

It's not that the process is arduous. 

I kept getting so caught up in reading the book that I forgot to work on the conversion.

Riding Shotgun: A book for men and the partners they care for is not so much a chronicle as a series of connected thoughts and experiences. It tells of an exceptional man made all the more so because he truly doesn't think he's anything special at all. 

Then there's Kate, Don's wife. Don won Wife Lottery there. 

Not that I'm jealous. 

Well, maybe just a little.

A few hours work became two days. Oh, well. It was definitely worth the read. By the way, the link to the book is for the paperback version. I just sent Don the mobi files a few minutes ago. Once he uploads it to Amazon, I'll add the eBook link too.

Yes, you read that right. I sent Don the files, as in plural, as in many, as in my Temporary Tourrettes is just now leaving me.

Lest you think I'm upset with Don, rest assured I am not. I am grateful that he let me test this stuff on his baby. 

Imagine how much worse it would be to write a test book and THEN go through all this stuff! I needed to go through this to find the proper path, or at the least, one that works.

Amazon needs to work on the eBook creation/producing process. I designed and wrote (mostly) a full-blown Twitter Management System (myTweetPack.com). But, I had trouble with an eBook. 

Seriously? 

As it turns out, the best way to proceed has nothing to do with Amazon at all. Using Amazon's tools just caused grief. 

Tables of content didn't appear. Navigation bookmarks failed intermittently. Every conversion met with warnings and/or errors.

I tried with PDF, ePub, and finally HTML. The HTML worked best, but still no cigar.

ePub to Kindle sucks

Are you offended by that terminology? 

Not half as offended as I was trying to make the #&^%^#*^* conversion thing work. 

It did work but it was butt ugly. 

Page breaks disappeared. 

UTF-8 text refused to encode. (Those freaking curly quotes!)

Either the HTML Table of Contents would work or the Kindle bookmark navigation would work, but never both.

The process ignored page breaks. I dug around and found a custom Amazon tag, < mpb: pagebreak / > )(Note: the spaces are only so that the tag shows here. Omit them)

Page breaks appeared once I added those tags in. Thank God for GREP!

I still wasn't happy. Navigation would be the eBook's downfall. Who wants to scroll all over the place?

I was about to just give up and send Don a print-replica when I remembered Calibre. Calibre is a free software for reading, organizing, and, yes, converting eBooks.

I started with an ePub. Not a good idea. I switched over to HTML and that worked much better. It needs to be finagled somewhat, but it works. 

A Caveat: The Table of Contents will once again cause fits of Temporary Tourettes. Try as I might, if I wanted bookmark navigation, I would get two Tables of Content or none at all. I "solved" that issue by asking Calibre to write the second ToC at the end of the book. Good enuff.

Another Caveat: Calibre isn't an Amazon property. It has no idea what  < mpb: pagebreak / > means. No worries. I went back to good old CSS and styled in page breaks. That was just a simple Find/Replace thing.

I didn't dig deeply into Calibre.

It's quite the powerful beast. Maybe I'll play with it some more. Who knows, maybe I'll even find a way to further simplify this process. 

Going forward, I hope I can find the time to put Calibre through its paces. A quick once-over of their documentation hints that it may well be a go-to tool. It may even be THE go-to tool. 

I added it to my long list of things I need to take a long look at.

UPDATE: The process in brief

1 - Prepare your manuscript. I write in Word. Don sent me a PDF. Whatever.
2 - Save it as HTML or Web Page. I used InDesign. Word can do it too. InDesign writes better HTML.
3 - Two Choices here: Modify the HTML to add styling like page breaks, paragraph borders, etc. Here's an example. Bear in mind that code does not show up here so spaces are added. Where there should be a space, I added " + ."

Example: Let's say your chapter headings are < h1 + class = "Chapter_NewPg" >. You want them to always start on a new page (screen load). Use Search and Replace to replace all that < h1 > text with  < h1 + class = "Chapter_NewPg" + style="page-break-before:always;" >

Second way: If your HTML process builds a seperate CSS file, make the modifications to < h1 + class = "Chapter_NewPg" > there. Just add a line that reads page-break-before  :always; .

4 - Add a new book to Calibre using the new HTML as a source. Hit Convert.

5 - Fill in the details like Author name, title, publisher, etc. Add your cover image (1688px on the short side by 2700 on the long side)

6 - Convert

7 - Save to your hard drive

8 - Open KindlePreviewer

9 - Open the file marked as Kindle Content.

10 - If you have errors and/or warnings, check them to see what needs fixing. Fix them. Hit Goto->Home, reopen the file

Yes, this is the easy way.

How long did it REALLY take

I need to discount my "Squirrel!" moments caused by Don's excellent writing. The initial two days should really be about two hours, three at the outside. It's really only applying Styles to text in InDesign. I think Word can do the trick well enough. 

Throw out the 7 or so hours trying to make Amazon tools do the job. 

Throw out 2 hours of web research. 

Throw out an hour of hand-coding XML into OPF (Open Packaging Format) and NCX (Navigation Center eXtended) files. I ended up not even needing those.

Throw out two hours of installing and studying Kindlegen (Kindlegen is a command-line interface to build KF8 files. It's built right into Kindle Previewer! You don't need it unless you plan to convert in bulk. Even then, I question the need for it.).  

Throw out an hour-long walk to clear my head.

Throw out two hours of learning the basics of Calibre.

Carry the one.

Divide by two extra-strength Excedrin.

Raise to the power of two Dirty Martinis, extra olives.

And you get...

About 4 hours of actual productive work.

That's doable. 

The next time I won't need to run down so many blind alleys.

Now, neither will you.

Thanks again, Don. I appreciate your letting me play with your work.

Cheers,