Kindle Publishing: Sometimes Hard for Monsters

Today we have a guest blogger, Sondi Miller, here to talk to us about her experiences publishing her Monster books on the Kindle.

As of Valentine’s Day, The Monster Love Book has been published!

A Big Monster off of my Back. The first publishing, through Lulu.com went very quickly. I had all the files ready, starting with .doc files and cover .jpg files. They were converted without any problems.

Both paper bound edition and e-book looked very nice and close to each other in style. The book went live immediately.

I then took the paper bound .pdf files, both cover and inside files, a conversion of the .doc files from Lulu, and used those files at Createspace.com and published them. That also went well but I am still waiting for the proof copy to arrive before it goes live. The prices are almost exactly the same at Lulu and Createspace for the finished product if purchased on line.

As soon as I have received the proof copy from Createspace, I can accept the proof and it will become live. Until then it is still available through Lulu.com for immediate purchase.

The biggest headache throughout the whole Pod Publishing experience was and is Amazon’s kindle.

Since my books are extremely heavy with illustrations, I was concerned, because as before when publishing one of my Monster Classics, the formatting for the illustrations gets a little goofed up when you look at the preview at Amazon’s DTP shelf.

Amazon now has a new preview in place after extensive remodeling of the kindle publishing process. It is supposed to show the book as it would appear on the kindle when you preview the book.

After several attempts to upload and preview the book, I finally had to take out a couple of illustrations to make it look tolerable.

Most e-books are published in a one page format. Meaning you read from the top of the first page, never turning a page, just continue reading down the lines until you reach the end. It looks really nice when they are well formatted.

The Monster Love book was formatted to my liking with the .doc file and converted well into a .pdf file. But neither of these files would convert well into the kindle. It would not acknowledge the poem formatting, inserting a tabbed indent every time a new sentence started. I also had a small .jpg of a Capital letter for a couple of paragraphs that it would not accept in the way I wanted to use it.

The Capital letter .jpg should be the first part of a sentence with the rest of the word following the .jpg.

This is the .jpg picture for the Capital “M” and it would be followed by the rest of the word “onster.”

I use another font as well as size for this illustration’s word.

None of this would show up on the kindle. I can understand the font not showing up. It would be nice if it would.

But to not have the conversion accept the word after the picture is something that I could not seem to fix. The rest of the word would start on the next line instead of continuing on the right side of the .jpg to spell the word.

In previous books it would show up nicely in the kindle version.

This time I was not so lucky.

I admit I had a personal deadline hanging over my head. But no matter what I tried I could not get the word and picture to show up correctly.

I tried .doc format, .pdf format, .html format and filtered .html. So finally I had to settle for getting rid of the pictures and change the title.

My title ended up being one big .jpg picture.

And I cut the pictures at the beginning of the sentences.

The best format to use in uploading to the kindle is .html. You can save the .doc file into an .html web page. Pictures and file can be zipped up then uploaded to the Amazon’s DTP shelf.

Until the next Monster Classic, beware!

Enjoy Love Monster Style with my new book, The Monster Love Book.

Available at Lulu.com, Createspace.com and Amazon.com