Getting On The Kindle Gravy Train Bandwagon

Between about 4:00 p.m. on Thursday and 8:30 last night, I was very much a man on a mission. I was working fairly obsessively at producing a Kindle-friendly version of my Math book after a friend pointed me to some information about how easy it is to sell books for that device via Amazon. In fact, he was right: it's a pretty straight-forward and well-documented process, which is always a pleasant surprise to run into.

The complication, once I got into it, is of course in making the book look even half-decent on that eReader. While I imagine it's technically possible to just "port" it over as is, assuming that the Kindle customer will forgive the fact that the book looks like crap on the device, that's not anything I'd be comfortable having my name on. So I spent what probably amounted to 12 to 15 hours creating a Kindle version of my book in Word, iteratively making changes and then seeing what they looked like via a piece of software called the KindlePreviewer. Once I started, it became an all-consuming task (much like programming used to, at times). This was a tedious process, but also a rewarding one: I could watch as my book progressed ever so gradually from God-awful ugly on the Kindle to something I'm at least a little proud of.

For example, I had to figure out what to do with all of the page # references in the original version, as they were completely meaningless on the hand-held device. I discovered that I could replace each with an internal hyperlink, which then opened up all kinds of possibilities for dynamic linkages that I couldn't do with a physical book. In the end, I didn't follow down that path quite as far as I could have, as there were subtle references in the text that, had I taken the time to find each one, could all have been modified to include hyperlinks. To be honest, though, after that amount of time, I was getting fairly burned out and just wanted it published. So I settled for replacing all page and chapter #s with links, along with a few of the less obvious references that I stumbled across.

I also had to reconfigure all of the tables in the Word document, of which there were many! The table borders were not showing up at all on the KindlePreviewer (and therefore, I assume, wouldn't appear on the device itself). Worse yet, the contents of the columns were being squished together with no space between them. Knowing that I had to change them anyway, I took the opportunity to completely change the layout of those tables to something that would look better on the Kindle. The results are great; the amount of work involved, however, was substantial.

Along the same lines, I shifted all bulleted lists all the way to the left margin, since real estate is so limited on that sort of device. Even after doing so, the bullet points still show up indented, but not as dramatically. A handful of other similar modifications were required as I'd see what something looked like via the preview application.

Last night I submitted the book for review. It appears to have passed that stage as it now shows up as "Publishing" on my Kindle dashboard within Amazon, which is supposed to only take another 24 hours. Once it's actually out there, I'll post a link to it if it's accessible via the website (for all I know, you may only be able to see it via a Kindle itself).

Now I just have to decide if I want to go through that all over again for my AgileMan books! For the moment, at least, I'm taking a break. I'm still not convinced that I'll make (m)any sales out of this, but I'd love to be proven wrong!!

[Update the next day: Looks like it's live!]