Using Amazon's KDP Paperback Publishing System - Some Tips

[hunter]

6. Six passes!

I think the Microsoft Word environment frequently makes projects like this more complicated than they need to be.

Creating a plain text paperback ought to be a one-click function. Maybe it can approach that if you learn the "Dos and Don'ts" of Amazon's KDP and start with one of the KDP Microsoft Word templates, taking great care not to change anything in the document but the text.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834230

If I ever decide to publish my bad novels, most of them explorations of my own madness, they're all written in plain text, the earliest using vi, and the latest, Markdown. Pandoc can effortlessly covert those into epubs or MS Word documents.

The "word processor" I use on my chromebook is mado.

Keep it Simple Stupid keeps me out of a lot of trouble. Write plain text first, make the document pretty last. Always save your final document in a plain text format.

For a few years I did most of my writing on an Atari 800 using Paperclip. Those files were easy to convert to html with a simple batch file when I moved on to PC compatible machines. I wrote a little Turbo Pascal program that would extract and convert files directly from Atari disks.

For a time I was writing html, <i> </i> for italics etc., but grew to hate pointy brackets and slashes. Anything XML is fugly.