madfilkentist (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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ebooks2013-05-12 12:30 pm
madfilkentist) wrote in ebooks2013-05-12 12:30 pm
Some notes on KDP
The process of getting Files that Last up and selling on KDP was a straightforward and quick one. It gave me some experience with preparing a book with tricky formatting, and some notes on this might be useful to others.
I prefer supporting Smashwords to Amazon; Amazon takes a closed-platform approach and encourages DRM in books. Still, lots of people buy through Amazon and I'm not cutting my nose off to spite my face.
Amazon, unlike Smashwords, lets you preview your converted book before publishing it. This is a wonderful thing, and I went through several rounds of formatting. The first time, I uploaded a Word file and discovered some annoying problems, especially with XML formatting. All the monospaced text had been turned into a proportional font, and everything was right-justified. This meant that if a line of code wrapped, it was stretched out with wide spaces to the right margin.
I figured out that the better plan was to save the book as HTML and tweak the CSS. (A basic understanding of HTML and CSS should be part of any self-published e-book author's skill set.) OpenOffice saves a file with lots of CSS markup, without which the effort would have been impossible.
A few changes to the styles produced much better results. Where there was a font declaration of 'font-family: "Courier-new", monospace', I removed the Courier-new reference. It seems to confuse KDP's conversion software. For all styles that applied to computer code, I added 'text-align:left'. For a really big block of computer code, I used <PRE>.
If I'd started with KDP, I would have done a lot more fiddling with the styles, but I might want to update both the Smashwords and KDP editions in the future, so I didn't want the two versions diverging too much.
In setting the foreign-currency prices, I could have opted for automatic conversion from the dollar prices, but this would have led to prices with odd numbers of cents. I figured they'd look more attractive to the buyer if they were all x.99, so I adjusted most of them even if it meant charging a few cents less.
Amazon got back to me the same day with the news that my book was accepted for online sales.
I prefer supporting Smashwords to Amazon; Amazon takes a closed-platform approach and encourages DRM in books. Still, lots of people buy through Amazon and I'm not cutting my nose off to spite my face.
Amazon, unlike Smashwords, lets you preview your converted book before publishing it. This is a wonderful thing, and I went through several rounds of formatting. The first time, I uploaded a Word file and discovered some annoying problems, especially with XML formatting. All the monospaced text had been turned into a proportional font, and everything was right-justified. This meant that if a line of code wrapped, it was stretched out with wide spaces to the right margin.
I figured out that the better plan was to save the book as HTML and tweak the CSS. (A basic understanding of HTML and CSS should be part of any self-published e-book author's skill set.) OpenOffice saves a file with lots of CSS markup, without which the effort would have been impossible.
A few changes to the styles produced much better results. Where there was a font declaration of 'font-family: "Courier-new", monospace', I removed the Courier-new reference. It seems to confuse KDP's conversion software. For all styles that applied to computer code, I added 'text-align:left'. For a really big block of computer code, I used <PRE>.
If I'd started with KDP, I would have done a lot more fiddling with the styles, but I might want to update both the Smashwords and KDP editions in the future, so I didn't want the two versions diverging too much.
In setting the foreign-currency prices, I could have opted for automatic conversion from the dollar prices, but this would have led to prices with odd numbers of cents. I figured they'd look more attractive to the buyer if they were all x.99, so I adjusted most of them even if it meant charging a few cents less.
Amazon got back to me the same day with the news that my book was accepted for online sales.