Kindle Edition Ready Soon, Again

I've been so busy working on the Kindle edition of Where Love Once Lived, I don't know if I've told you about it or not. So, there may be some repetition here. I'll just give you the highlights today, but I plan to document the whole thing from my notes so that I don't have the same problems with my next book. And, who knows, maybe you will benefit from my experience when you want to publish a Kindle book.

When I first published on Kindle, I used the pdf version supplied by CreateSpace. I had not kept my Microsoft Word up to date during the editing process (mistake #1).

Amazon scans the pdf and converts it to html. However, the paragraph formatting was wrong and the section breaks were wrong. I tried converting pdf to word to html, but that didn't work and wasted several days (mistake #2).

Meanwhile I had published the pdf version (mistake #3) and had sold one before I could stop it. Luckily, it was bought by an understanding friend. It was readable, but looked bad.

Next, I downloaded the published Kindle version to html and loaded it into Microsoft Expressions. I went through line by line and cleaned it up. Some corrections could be done with Find and Replace. Some couldn't. I used a special tag provided by Amazon for page breaks, a tag not usually available for html, but one that makes the content look more like a book. The one thing I couldn't automate was identifying paragraphs. This is needed so Kindle can automatically indent and not insert lines. So, I went through each paragraph and made the changes. I worked on it for several days and still had a third of the book to do. When I told a friend about it, he said there should be a better way.

Last night, before going to sleep, my mind worked out a solution. I remembered I had easily changed the Word version I had created from pdf by replacing double paragraph marks with a holding character, deleting single paragraph marks, and then replacing the holding character with double paragraph marks. (This will make sense to some of you.) So, I went back to that Word file, copied the sections of the book one at a time, deleting the Word formatting, and pasting it into the html version. I could only do one section at a time in order to keep the special formatting already entered for section and chapter breaks.

It worked.

I published this morning and was told it would be ready in 48 hours.