I've written three books for traditional publishers and that process was pretty straight-forward, although one loses a lot of control once the manuscript is submitted. So I decided I wanted to learn how to write and publish an ebook. I thought that would give me the control over not only content, but also look and feel. I picked Amazon because it's the largest retailer out there and because their system seemed pretty simple to understand.
It turns out that writing a Kindle book is pretty easy. Basically you write your book in Microsoft Word (or one of the clones) and then upload it to the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) system where it is formatted for e-readers. You get to review your book and make as many changes (and new uploads) as you like before you hit the "Publish" button. But - and there's always a but - it's not quite that loosey-goosey.
First you have to create a KDP account, including giving Amazon your bank information so they can deposit your royalties. You also need to decide on which royalty type (35% or 70%) you are going to use. While 70% sounds attractive, there are a number of restrictions that will push most people (including me) to the 35% level.
Once you've created your KDP account you can write your book. Beware of the Amazon support pages. It appears that they've not been updated for several years. For example, several of the pages assume the only type of file you can upload is "edited HTML", which is now incorrect. You can directly upload an MS Word file. Before you begin writing you should create a template for your book in MS Word. Amazon has guidelines for that and it's really important that you follow their guidelines and format your book properly. The template is essential for margins, paragraph formats, fonts, and the table of contents. Also make sure that you use sections to separate the front matter from the body of the text.
One problem I had was with monospaced fonts. The documentation leads you to believe that you should limit the number of different fonts you use and that you should use "common" fonts, but that multiple fonts are allowable in your manuscript. That was not my experience. My book had a number of cryptograms in it that required that the letters on different lines to line up. This is, of course, problematic in a variable-spaced font like Times New Roman. So, believing the Amazon support pages, I used Courier for my cryptograms. Did. not. work. The first time I uploaded my manuscript and received back the review file the entire book was in a single variable-spaced font; all my cryptograms were wrong.
Several hours in the Amazon KDP community forums convinced my that there was no way for me to include the monospaced font in my manuscript. So my solution (and it's not great) was to embed all my cryptograms in tables and make the tables as narrow as possible (also not an easy task). That made things look pretty good and the cryptograms lined up properly.
Other miscellaneous weirdnesses cropped up. All your chapter titles should be Heading 1 types so the Table of Contents works correctly. Despite what the Amazon guidelines said, I never got my table of contents entries to be live links to the proper pages within the ebook. There is some Kindle magic I'm missing here. Also, don't do page numbers and make sure that you turn off including page numbers in your Table of Contents. Ebooks will get re-formatted and ebook readers don't do page numbers so they're useless and confusing to the user.
The cover was another area of confusion. You must create a cover for a Kindle ebook and the cover must be an image of some kind. Thankfully, Amazon has a Cover Creator app that you can use and has a dozen or so themes you can work around. You can also upload your own cover image. Beware, though and don't include the author and title there because the Cover Creator will also include them. I am not a designer, so using Cover Creator was very helpful for me, although the next time I may find a graphic designer to work with instead.
Other than that, the rest of the process was pretty simple. When you're ready you upload your manuscript, Amazon converts it into a Kindle ebook, you review the converted file, make any changes you need to (and re-submit and re-review), and when you're happy hit Save and Publish and you're done. Amazon's conversion program will check for spelling and formatting errors it can't fix and let you know. For my book I kept finding minor typographic and syntactic errors so I ended up submitting the book half a dozen times. Once you decide to publish though, Amazon will have your book up for sale within a day (I never waited more than a few hours).
Overall, creating an ebook was a pretty easy and pleasurable experience. Enjoy!
