Adventures in Writing a book and then Publishing to Amazon

So I decided last year to write a book on WordPress when I couldn't find one I liked for a class I was asked to teach. And because I am such a fan of Google Docs, which has since become Google Drive, I decided to write the book using Google Docs/Drive. The neat thing about this was I could edit my book on any device that could access Google Drive. For the rest of this post, Google Docs and Google Drive will be interchangeable in case I forget to call it by its proper name. 

I wrote a chapter or five a week and I had the book over half way done when I started the class. When the class started WordPress was in version 3.2. I kept updating the book and it became very screen capture heavy as I find at times pictures tell a story better than words. So I began looking at what I needed to do to format the book for Amazon. First I had done all of my images in PNG, Kindle prefers JPG. Okay, so I fixed this by saving the book at HTML from Google Drive and it saved out my images to a folder called strangely enough, images. So I then loaded up IfranView and converted all of my images from PNG to JPG and left them at 100% quality. Oh, then I bought a book on formatting pictures for Kindle called

Pictures on Kindle: Self Publishing Your Kindle Book with Photos, Drawings, and Other Graphics, or Tips for Formatting Your Images So Your Ebook Doesn't Look Horrible (Like Everyone Else's)

 It is a good book and I learned how to format my cover and that my images aren't supposed to be over 128k, though if you read Amazon's Building your Book for Kindle. It says the images have to be 127k or less.

Building Your Book for Kindle

So I then went back into ifranview and after downloaded the filters file for IrfanView's RIOT plugin to tell it to set all of my images to 128k. It worked.

So next I used Calibre, which totally rocks by the way. I imported the html book and it created an epub of my book. I told it to format my book for Kindle. I edited the metadata in the program before doing the conversion. It created an epub of my book which I then loaded into the Kindle Previewer to see if it would turn out okay. And strangely it did. So I then went to Amazon and uploaded my book and entered my information to start the process. So I published my book on Amazon for Kindle. Once I published the book, Amazon tells you it will be 12 to 24 hours before the book will be available. And then after I published it, I realized I had a typo on the cover page. This happen as I was working on a subtitle and changed my mind on what it should say at the last minute. Luckily I still had the cover open in Photoshop so I fixed it. But my entry was out there with the typo for at least 7 plus hours before they fixed it. This was scary and I didn't want to tell anyone about my book until it was fixed. But now it is resolved and there it is. Here is a link to my book:

WordPress From Setup to Website

To say the least I am very excited and I have already sold some copies. I have some updates coming and everyone who buys the book gets the updates. That is a neat feature that Amazon now has. If you decide to buy my book, contact me via email and I will send you the book in a DRM free PDF.