publishing for Kindle
I recently published a paperback book on amazon which includes PDF's of scores that I created using musescore. I would like to make a version for Kindle to reach a larger audience.
Kindle supports a variety of formats according to this link https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634390
Since I am a newbie at publishing, the PDF option appears to me to be the best approach. I was wondering if anyone has ever published any of your music as an eBook? What did you do, how did you do it? Anything to consider, pro's and con's, etc., Any help or suggestions are welcomed.
Comments
Word will open PDF files, if that helps. I imagine Open Office will too.
I have published a few books in ePub and Kindle formats and also made some scores for eReaders. The big difference between text pages and scores is that text reflow really messes up scores, so PDF makes a lot of sense for sheet music. PDF works well on Kindles, tablets, web browsers etc.
The other option is to make an AZW3 or KFX, (Kindle book format), with the scores as images. The ePub format, (non Kindle readers only), now supports a fixed layout but I don't think that Kindle has this option. PDF would be compatible across the whole range of eReaders whereas AZW3/KFX are tied to Kindle.
See also https://kitaboo.com/reflowable-or-fixed-layout-epub-which-is-better/
If you need to convert between formats then see:
https://calibre-ebook.com/
It's an excellent piece of free software.
I prepare books in ePub format and use calibre to generate AZW3 and PDF. Calibre can also convert from Microsoft Word documents. PDF is a poor format as an input source, (for converting to other formats), but good for output.
In reply to I have published a few books… by yonah_ag
I published a collection of hymns through Amazon as a paperback by up loading a pdf file which contained all the hymns and pages with text describing the history of the hymns and melodies. I'm thinking that my pdf is good to go for Kindle.
In reply to I published a collection of… by Don9of11
How do you make your PDFs? Does the table of contents work ok in the PDF on a Kindle. You should that check your book works correctly on an actual Kindle, (or at least on Kindle Previewer), but you should be pretty well ready to go. Just follow Amazon's publishing guidelines.
In reply to How do you make your PDFs?… by yonah_ag
I exported my scores as a pdf, then I used Adobe Acrobat DC to combine files. But you bring up something I hadn't thought about and that is linking the table of contents. I ordered a Kindle fire and I should be getting next week sometime.
In reply to I exported my scores as a… by Don9of11
Acrobat DC may have already taken care of this for you but it might end up as an inline ToC rather than being available on the Kindle's "Goto" function. Alternatively it may be part of the upload to Amazon processing.
If I find some time I'll have a play with making a Kindle book of scores based on Amazon's AZW3 format with the scores as .PNG images from Musescore. This would have the benefit of text paragraphs being reflowed independently of the images in response to a user changing the font size. It would be handy having all my scores in an eBook.