Checking Your Ebook Formatting on Your Kindle

Total Read Time: 5 minutes

Before I had a Kindle, I relied on KDP’s (Kindle Direct Publishing’s) Preview tool to check the formatting of my ebook.  After a few hours of trial and error of uploading several slightly different files, I seemed to get closer to what I wanted my book to look like, but it still seemed a little off. After doing some research, I found out that there are some known glitches with Preview (start of page paragraph indents going AWOL and the like), so I scratched my anomalies up to bugs in Preview.

So now that I have a Kindle, I thought it would be nice to have my own ebook loaded on it.  Once I finally figured out how to download my book without having to pay for it, I started scrolling through and came to the horrible realization: the wonky formatting could not be blamed on the Preview tool.

So first of all, my humble apologies to anyone who purchased The Unclean before last week for the weird indents and whatnot.  I swear, I tried my best to follow all the formatting guidelines I could get my hands on.

And for anyone selling their ebook on Amazon who owns a Kindle, let this be a lesson to you to check your formatting directly on your device. Now that I’ve worked out all the bugs, I’ve tested my book and I can say with complete confidence that it looks great. I will definitely be doing this with each new book going forward.

How to Download Your Own Ebook for Free on Kindle

This is a little tricky. Unlike Smashwords, KDP doesn’t seem to have a simple way to download your own work without paying for it. It’s as if the author as an Amazon customer and the author as a user of KDP are two separate entities, even though they share the same login and account info. (Is Amazon hoping we will buy our own work so they can make 30% profit?)

Here is the voodoo magic you need to perform:

1.  Login to your KDP account

2.  Either select one of the existing books on your Bookshelf and click the Edit Book Details option from the Actions dropdown, or click the Add a New Title button at the top of the screen if you are uploading a  new book.

3.  On the next screen, scroll down to the Upload Your Book File area.  If you are uploading a new title, select a DRM option, browse for and upload your book file.

4.  Once you have a file uploaded and converted, click the Preview Book button.

5.  The popup window is KDP’s Preview tool. You can scroll through your book here if you want, but it’s not totally accurate. To get the file, click the Download HTML link at the top of the popup screen and save the file to your computer.

 
6.  Locate the downloaded file on your computer.

7.  Create a new folder somewhere on your computer that will be easy for you to find later.

8.  Cut and paste your downloaded HTML file into the new folder.

9.  Even though the downloaded file is already zipped, Amazon can only convert double-zipped files, so right-click your new folder and either select Send to-->Compressed (zipped) folder if you’re using a PC, or Compress if you’re on a Mac. This will create a new, zipped file in the same location.

10.  Attach a copy of the double-zipped file to an email and send it to: [Kindle User Name]@free.kindle.com. Your Kindle User Name is the part of the email address before the @ in whatever address you have registered with Kindle.

11.  About five minutes later, you should get an email back from Amazon confirming your converted file. If your Kindle has Wi-fi access, your ebook will be transferred to your device automatically. Otherwise, you can follow the instructions in Amazon’s email to transfer your file to your Kindle manually.

Hint:  If you’re not sure what email address you have registered with Kindle, go to Amazon.com to Manage Your Kindle. Click on Manage Your Devices in the sidebar and look for the first part of the @kindle.com address listed under Kindle E-mail Address in the middle of the screen.

 

Whew! Now your ebook should be on the home page of your Kindle. You can scroll through it to check the formatting and test out any links. You can perform these steps as many times as necessary to get the file right if you find you need to make any changes. Just remember that changes must be made to the original book file you uploaded to KDP. (Since you will have a few files going on with this process, it can get confusing.)

Hope this helps! If you have any questions (or want to share any related tips/tricks), please let me know.