How to Publish a Kindle ebook: Self-publish your own Kindle ebook using Microsoft Word

Now that Amanda Hocking has made a gazillion dollars from self-publishing her Kindle ebooks on Amazon — and has been the recent subject of a publishing bidding war that left her with a substantial book deal — people are becoming more interested in writing and publishing their own Kindle ebooks.

In January of 2011, I had the pleasure of self-publishing my own first Kindle ebook — a real book, but also kind of a test for myself to see if I could do it. That one is written under a pen name, but there will be plenty more successful Kindle ebooks published by me now that I’ve actually been through the somewhat painstaking process of publishing my own Kindle version of a book on Amazon.

I made the Kindle book publishing process harder than it had to be…

…but at least I learned how to publish Kindle books easier now.

Turns out, I could’ve done a lot cleaner formatting in Word first. I already had the basics of my Kindle ebook already written out for the most part in Microsoft Word.

I beefed up the words to my Christian tome that were in Word until they reached over 44,000 — which I think translates to about 210 pages on the Kindle. (For some reason when I look at any of my books on my Kindle right now, they are not showing the page numbers like they did before, after my friend showed me how to hit “menu” and watch the Kindle go from locations to page numbers after their recent update.)

Anyway, my first step was to read much of the info found in the newly-renamed Kindle Direct Publishing platform, the first place to start when you are ready to write your Kindle book.

It’s best to go through there first and learn everything you can about formatting your Kindle ebook before you get too in-depth into formatting it in Microsoft Word, because that’s one of the things that took me longer to correct, the stuff I didn’t know wouldn’t translate well from Word to Kindle.

From Microsoft Word document to Kindle ebook published on Amazon

While you’re still in Microsoft Word, read this Simplified Guide to Building a Kindle Book by the Kindle Direct Publishing people to learn that you can still use “indentations, bold characters, italics and headings, as they will translate into your Kindle book,” as well as how to insert images in your Kindle book while still in Word, like such:

“The Kindle file format internally supports JPEG and GIF images of up to 127KB in size,” says KDP.

“However, bullet points, special fonts, headers, and footers will not be transferred so avoid those,” the KDP people warn, and I think this is where my learning lesson came in. I’d used some kind of heading style that I ended up having to change nearly line-by-line in Notepad to make it look right on the Kindle.

I’d gone through all these elaborate styles in Word that I eventually had to strip out in Notepad and just replace my styles with header 1 and header 2 and header 3 tags for chapter titles, subheads, etc.

But I should’ve merely typed all my book in Word and formatted it in Word by designating the title as title, and the chapter titles as heading 1 by highlighting them in Word and choosing header 1:

My next Kindle book, I’ll probably write things in a pretty basic format in Word and then save as the Web Page, Filtered (*HTM &*HTML) file that Kindle Direct Publishing instructs us is the next step in the process.

One thing you’ll notice after saving your Microsoft Word document as the Web Page, Filtered (*HTM &*HTML) file that Kindle Direct Publishing suggests is a warning message.

Saving yourwinningbook.htm in this format (Web Page, Filtered) will remove the Office-specific tags. Some Office features may not be available when you reopen this page. Do you want to save the document in this format?

* To save, click Yes.
* To preserve formatting, click No. Then save the document in Web Page format (HTML).

This is one thing I didn’t anticipate after I’d spent a bunch of time formatting my Kindle book all nice and pretty in Microsoft Word.

Go ahead and click yes:

You can view your .htm file in Notepad or upload to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform…and do it in the Mobipocket Creator under ‘Edit with HTML editor’

Don’t be scared by all the HTML code when you open your file in Notepad that will look something like this:

As you can see from the above pic, there will be a lot of stuff in the htm file, and if you page down, you’ll eventually see your text, wrapped in a lot of paragraph tags.

At the least, you should already see your chapter titles wrapped in h1 tags (if you did it correctly in Word) so your readers will have a nice Table of Contents to navigate through that looks similar to this:

You can add h2 tags for the next level down if you want, like for your section titles, but know that they will then show up on your Table of Contents indented down under each appropriate title, like an outline format.

Since I had a bunch of subsections, I didn’t want to add a bunch of h2 and h3 tags and make my Table of Contents five pages long, but I can see where folks might want to use them to help their readers find the specific sections of their books they want faster.

I could’ve used the Mobipocket Creator’s ‘edit with HTML editor’ to make any changes in the HTM file instead of using Notepad at all, but to tell you the truth, I love Notepad — plus I got a little confused with the Mobi creator’s saving process, and ended up not updating all my changes and had to backtrack. At least in Notepad I know what I’m saving.

As far as your pics and images go, I thought I’d be able to host those on my servers or wherever, but I guess it’s better that Amazon makes us upload them under the “publication files” link — and that’s how Kindle knows where to find the same-named, corresponding image file that we had insert in our Word document.

Make sense? I hope so.

Note: Color pics will show up in black and white on the actual Kindle — and use whatever width and height of pic that you want that will still fit on the Kindle according to their limits. (You can test how it looks after publishing.)

Your cover image can be uploaded under the “cover image” link.

Uploading your HTM file to Mobipocket Creator, and then onto the Kindle!

So once you’ve got your Web Page, Filtered (*HTM &*HTML) file all nice and pretty with h1 tags and hyperlinks (oh yeah, you can hyperlink in Word too) and what-not, you can download Mobipocket Creator here on the MobiPocket.com site for free and follow the instructions they give you on KDP to turn it into a .prc file that you can then upload to KDP and have your own Kindle book for sale after a day or two or three.

But first…formatting your Table of Contents in your Kindle book

The Table of Contents section took me a minute to figure out, but as long as you just have all your chapter titles wrapped around h1 tags like above, you can define them as such in the Mobipocket Creator:

Viewing how your Kindle ebook will look after it’s published

On that same page, Amazon tells us how to download and use the Kindle Previewer to check out our ebooks and make sure they look like we want them after being published.

I took it a step further and finally bought my own Kindle, because I didn’t yet own one while I wrote and published my Kindle book, but ordered one and had it shipped to me around the day my Kindle book would be published so I could see what my customers would be reading — and make sure it looked good.

I also already had the free Kindle for PC version from Amazon, so I was able to check out how my Kindle book looked there, too.

Eventually, my husband bought me a Droid, so that was another place I was able to view my Kindle ebook after having it published.

What HTML code tags can you use for your Kindle book?

HTML may look intimidating at first, like it did for me back in 2006 or so when I marveled at another blogger who had inserted hyperlinks all through her blog post.

These days, bless God, I’m so comfortable with HTML that I prefer to type in the “HTML” tab of my blog posts rather than the “visual” side.

A basic Google search will show you how to insert a link in your Kindle ebook (join Amazon Associates if you have a website and get paid a percentage of referrals!) or how to make a certain passage bold, italicized, etc. — but if you do all this stuff in your Microsoft Word document first then save as the Web Page, Filtered (*HTM &*HTML) file, you shouldn’t have to do any or very little HTML monkeying around.

But here are the HTML tags supported by Kindle, according to the Kindle people.

One site I found helpful during the process was KindleFormatting.com, a guy who probably has his hands full formatting other people’s Kindle books — but he gives away some good tips for free.

His FAQ page gives tips on justification, and I liked his tip about using multiple blockquote tags in your Kindle code, like for poetry, but I did go a little crazy with using three, I believe, because I wanted to indent my Bible quotes.

One or two might have sufficed.

The Kindle Formatting site also has this PDF file that gives more supported HTML and CSS codes, but KDP says to avoid CSS inside HTML, which is the format they recommend the best.

Even though you can upload some versions of Word docs directly without having to use Mobi, Kindle Direct Publishing says HTML is the best — so that’s why I chose the Word to Mobi to Kindle route.

You don’t have to unpublish your Kindle book if you make a mistake..

…like I read one woman did on the Kindle forums.

You can correct your HTM file in the HTML editor on Mobi or on Notepad, upload it again, and create as many new prc files as you need to — even after it’s published. Or even easier, go back and correct everything in Word and save it as the web filtered htm html file and reupload to Mobi and recreate a new prc file.

I found it easier to delete the old prc files, but I know there was something a little wonky in my understanding the way the iterations of the htm files are processed on Mobi, so I think I’ll get as much done on Word and Notepad as I can first in my next Kindle book.

Stay tuned…publish and prosper!