I’ve had these icons on my desktop for about three years now…
See the “Kindle Create” and the “calibre” icons? Kindle Create is Amazon’s tool for making ebook format files out of your Word document file. Calibre is the open source version of the same.
Although I did some fiddling around in Calibre, I ultimately chickened out and went with Kindle Create. Calibre offers a few more bells and whistles and more formatting choices, but I just saw those as a risk: the bells and whistles just made it more likely that I would get it WRONG and it wouldn’t work across ebook formats.
Formatting an ebook from a properly formatted Word file is pretty easy, once you know what to do (I learned that one the hard way with Skywriting in 2013). Formatting a book for print is an utter pain in the ass, but the advantage is that, after you’ve done all the typesetting, pagination, margin control, headers, and page numbers, you submit a PDF document to Amazon — so you know exactly what the book is going to look like. I find that reassuring.
The book is technically available for pre-order now, but I’m not fully advertising it yet because I’m still waiting for the cover art to come back. When I have THAT in hand, I’ll feel better about advertising and marketing … and revealing the title.