Publishing for the Amazon Kindle – Part 2 – Converting with Mobipocket

Part 1 of this series looked at preparing your word document for the Amazon Kindle platform.

This part is looking at converting the document to the required .mobi format.

Step 1: Kindle Desktop reader

To check your ebook you’ll also need Amazon’s Kindle Reader for desktops:

Go to Amazon.com, look under shop all departments and roll over the Kindle link until you see ‘Free Kindle Reading Apps’

Depending on what you’re using choose Windows PC or Mac

Download and install. This is to test that your Kindle book looks ok on their platform.

Step 2: MobiPocket

Let’s now head over to mobipocket.com. Scroll down until you see Free downloads (or click here)

On the next screen there are download options. Download the Publisher Edition (below)

Next open a window where your word document is and pull it alongside the mobipocket screen, as below, then just drag the word document onto the red book icon.

(Note you could turn your word document into a PDF before this stage and import that as well)

Then click import on the following screen:

From now on you’ll work with the Mobipocket version.You should keep the original safe in case you ever want to go back and make changes.

Assuming your file is correctly formatted you should get through to the next screen. On the view stack there are different links which you’ll need to go through.

So let’s click on Cover Image and upload that first. You can either drag the cover from the window folder, as we did with the word document over onto the ‘add a cover’ button or click the ‘add a cover’ button and browse for the cover. Then click update.

Next click on table of contents in the view stack.

This is where you set the contents to be the H1 headers that we put in the word document earlier.

Click add table of contents’ and add ‘h1’ to the first level field and click update as below:

Next click Build

Hopefully you’ll have no errors but if you do mobipocket will tell you. If you do click ‘show build details’.

Any errors will have yellow warning symbols: read these to see what the issue is. Typical problems might be hyperlinks not resolved, images or other data not specified at an earlier stage.