Does anyone have experience converting a book manuscript from Word to Kindle?

[Dixie Lang <dlang -at- terracom -dot- net>]

Greetings everyone,

My client has asked me to convert a 265-page book manuscript from MS 
Word 2007 to a Kindle-readable file.

Before I explain more, yes, I do realize Word is not a solid choice for 
manuscripts. At the moment I am stuck with it in Word.

I researched a bit on the Web about Kindle conversions, and I read the 
instructions on Amazon. I downloaded the Mobipocket reader and tried the 
conversion. Note that I used a stripped Word doc - I created a fresh 
doc, and tediously copied the front matter and first chapter through 
Notepad to strip all extraneous formatting codes. I then added back the 
bare minimum - bold and italics.

I expected Word to write horrendous HTML. What I did not expect was to 
lose all the vertical spacing. I was further horrified to see what the 
conversion did to a simple table. (Apparently the early Kindle software 
does not support tables.)

I then went back to digging up what I could find on the Web about Kindle 
conversions.  Much of the information is contradictory.  Some people 
recommended hand-coding the manuscript in HTML.

I have extensive experience hand-coding HTML, so that's not a problem.  
The amount of time it would take is the problem - it would totally blow 
the client's budget.  Further, that would mean the doc would need to 
remain in raw HTML, limiting who could maintain it, and raising the 
chances that someone down the road will resurrect an old copy of 
FrontPage and totally trash the file.

If anyone has done such a conversion, would you be willing to share best 
practices?  I am particularly interested in:

- settings in Word to output the HTML as cleanly as possible
- "clean up" scripts to remove Word's special formatting codes and 
streamline the HTML

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.

- Dixie

-- 
------------------------------------------------
Dixie Lang
Dalton Unlimited
Copywriting and More

(608) 628-6074

dlang -at- daltonunlimited -dot- com
------------------------------------------------
"Fortune favors the brave." - Joss Whedon







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