PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

The best way to have total control of your Kindle book is to give those guys at KDP just two things: a jpg image file of your cover and a mobi file of your book.

Mobi is the extension for the type of file that Kindle uses (there's also a prc extension). You get this sort of file as the natural output of KindleGen, the program Kindle uses to create your e-book.

You can download KindleGen and use it directly, or—better—get Kindle Previewer, which has KindleGen built into it. That way you'll also be able to see what your book looks like in various versions of Kindle—at which point you'll learn not everything that works in one version will work in others. Compromises are often necessary...

(Head on over to Amazon to download these programs for various operating systems.)

KindleGen looks for a minimum of five specific files on your computer within the folder that contains your book:

First, of course, is the HTML file of the text of your book.

Then it needs an HTML version of the book's Table of Contents.

Followed by the ncx version of the Table of Contents—so folks can see where they are in the book in terms of a percentage of the total.

(The ncx file creates what is called a Navigation Map of the book, noting in order the various parts: title page, chapter start pages, the about-the-author section at the end, and so forth.)

After this, KindleGen looks for a somewhat fussy item called the opf file.

(To be precise, KindleGen looks for the opf file first, since it points the way to all the other items mentioned—but I'm listing these guys in the order in which I plan to tackle them.)

Finally, KindleGen wants an image file of your book's cover.

(This is a reduced version of the cover and is embedded in the mobi file—so folks can remind themselves what your book's cover looks like while they're reading it. A much larger version of the cover image is used for display purposes on Amazon's Web page, but you'll be uploading that separately.)

This is the bare bones list. A well-made e-book may also contain an image file of the title page or additional images used to create custom chapter headings.

In future posts, I'll delve into each of these items in some detail.