Making kindle / ebooks from Word documents
From 2020-2025 I wrote 3 novels, a trilogy, with some unusual formatting. Text boxes, images with captions, big text, you know, standard book fare, I thought.
Turning those docx files into .azw3 (kf8) or .epub was an absolute nightmare. In the end I had to reformat all 3 books. Here are the shortcuts I learned, that has NO online source, not even Reddit.
If you’re having conversion hassles, these points may soothe your journey.
So, first off, the word doc is in fact a website. You can view the website by choosing ‘Web view’
Amazon format, kf8, azw3 etc… is also a website. And epub is
a website, too. Rename any epub to .zip and extract to see the site’s files: html, xml, css and jpegs.
Problem 1: Tables and floating boxes are not supported. No tables, no boxes of any kind, everything must be inline.
Problem 2: Tabs are ignored and multiple line returns are rendered as a single line return.
To create a one line gap, sometimes you have to put a white character on that line, like a period.
Problem 3: Reflow
To get a chapter to start on a fresh page, the previous chapter needs a page break. However, do not have that break as the last line on the page, it needs a gap after it.
Red- bad. Green-good.
Despite this, you’ll still get the odd blank page at the end of a chapter, but if you resize the window, that goes away.
Problem 4: LOTS of blank pages inserted randomly. I encountered this when viewing on an actual Kindle; removing all boxes and tables etc. solved this issue.
Problem 5: Amazon Kindle Create is garbage.
You’re a lot better off making all changes in Word then converting.
Problem 6: Weird hidden shit
Word is riddled with issues regarding tracking changes, hiding things etc. Use the ‘web view’ view to iron out those foibles.
All said and done, if you have some html skills then getting the final ebook to look the way you want is fairly easy. Editing in Calibre is exactly the same as coding a very basic site.
Bonus 1: Animated gifs play in the ebook, which means animation in the book… awesome.
Bonus 2: Muck about in html with outdated tags like <marquee> and get animation styles to display, mouseover events to display hidden text and all the fun stuff you don’t see in ebooks.
