I’ve been impressed lately with what a good job Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing does of turning a well-formatted Microsoft Word document, saved as a .pdf, into a pretty much perfect printed book — assuming the book is just a straightforward manuscript. Similarly, KDP does a great job creating a simple Kindle book using that same well-formatted Microsoft Word document, as a .docx file. All you have to do is add a table of contents, which Amazon gives you instructions for right there next to where you upload the file.
That has not always been the case, or anything close to it.
Because of how ridiculously bad KDP used to be at converting book files to Kindle, I used HTML to create all my early Kindle books, starting with a decent Word file. I still use it for anything complicated. There are times when nothing will give you a good Kindle book like doing it in HTML. It’s a formatting language. It’s what KDP understands. You can get in there and tell it to do anything within its powers. And it’s not difficult.
Back in 2015, I wrote up the instructions for how to use HTML to format Kindle books in Control Your Kindle Book Formatting: Simple Step-by-Step Instructions. You can read it here for free. Some of it’s out of date, but the book is a solid help for sure. I still consult it myself regularly.
Here’s an example where HTML comes in handy. I was recently tasked with creating the Kindle version of the classic alternative fuel book, Alcohol Can Be a Gas! The book is massive and complex: 640 8-1/2” by 11” pages, with 514 graphics, 473 footnotes, a 700-word glossary, and hundreds of sidebars. Here’s a sample page from the printed version (which I edited and laid out years ago):
Starting with the InDesign version, I fairly painlessly turned it into a problem-free Kindle book using HTML. Here’s a sample spread:
You can read a sample of the Kindle version of Alcohol Can Be a Gas! here.
