I found the manual for Kindle publishing to be... lacking, in many important aspects, so I battled my way through with some assistance from the help desk. It turned out to be easier than the manual says, so I've outlined the basic proceedure I ended up with, in order to get published on the Amazon Kindle. I was working in MS word 2003, so everything here will assume you're doing the same. Open Office didn't work out too well, as the exported HTML was gibberish! You might want to get the Kindle previewer to test the result of your efforts. 1. Keep the styles to a minimum. Bold & italics are fine, but don't go further than that. Make sure there's a page break after the end of each chapter. 2. Tabs need to be removed, which I did with a search & replace. Search for '^t' which represents tabs in the document, and replace them with a blank. I removed 4801 tabs from mine :)

3. Put bookmarks at all the chapter headings (done via the Insert menu). I used the bookmark tag 'ch1', 'ch2' etc for each chapter, and then made a series of hyperlinks on a page just after the start page, to be the table of contents. Just stack them on top of each other like so:

Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

4. The tag for the start of the book should be 'start', and this should be placed where the story actually begins. I put mine right in front of the word 'prologue'. The Kindle looks for that tag specifically.

5. Put the bookmark 'toc' at the top of the table of contents, as the Kindle looks for this when the user goes to bring up the contents page. Don't worry if it doesn't seem to work in the kindle previewer, that doesn't seem to have any bearing on this tag's usage.

6. Put your cover image right at the top on the first page. Make it a 300dpi jpeg image, for 'future proofing', as they say. I also included a map with mine, which I put just after the title page, and linked it with a bookmark and hyperlink in the toc.

7. Save the file as a filtered HTML. This is the document you want to upload to Amazon.com, which will then be converted into your Kindle book. Check it with the kindle previewer first and make sure the layout came out okay! You'll also be able to see the result in a preview as you're uploading the book, which comes in very handy.

So, that's how simple it turned out to be, but it took a lot of hair-pulling to get to this point. Soon, I hope to publish on another system called Smashwords, which distributes ebooks in a variety of formats for different systems, including Apple products, and bookstores like Barnes and Noble. So far, their formatting request for the file seems to be completely different than the proceedure I've used here, so when I figure it out, I'll be sure to update this page!