Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
You mention creating a mobi especially for Amazon. Why? According to their website they will accept an epub upload, and I imagine they would simple use kindlegen to do the conversion, which is all I was thinking of doing here ... or do you have another/preferred way of creating the mobi?
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Couple reasons...
1) First, this is the biggest seller out there. You want your best possible showing to the largest number of people.
2) You can upload non-mobi files, but the conversion on their end is touchy. I have seen TOCs disappear, and so on.
How I make a mobi...
I make an EPUB - and I make it as clean and as perfect as I can get using Sigil. That becomes my master for distribution. Then I let Calibri take that epub and make a mobi out of it. Then I take that mobi and load it on to my kindle and check how it looks there, and then I use the Kindle App on my mac to do the same, and then I use the Kindle viewer that Amazon gives out to see it in various other devices. I use information gained durring that to tweak the conversion parameters in Calibre and do it again till I am happy.
To make the original EPUB, I start with a MS Word DOCX file (not DOC, DOCX - makes a
big difference). Then I use Calibre to create an EPUB from that DOCX, and load that EPUB into Sigil where I tweak the file a bit (remove fonts, re do cover, and some other minor things, Calibre has gotten really good at making EPUBs).
When I am done with all that I have a clean MOBI and EPUB that work everywhere and I do not have the problems of getting emails from Amazon about formatting issues, or rejected by the Apple store, or the like that many self-pubs complain about.