Many authors or co-authors have a book on Amazon that they would also like to host on BooksOnline.Club, but they only possess a pdf format of their book. BooksOnline does not accept eBooks in a pdf format. All of BooksOnline’s eBooks are in an ePub format, which is readable by more devices and reading apps than any other format while maintaining an author’s correct original formatting. Even KDP converts all their eBook submissions into an ePub format. Still, conversions can mess with a book’s original formatting and cause serious problems if not fixed before uploading to KDP.
Uploading Multiple Formats to KDP is Not The Solution
It is true that you can upload the following file formats to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for eBook manuscripts:
EPUB (.epub) – The recommended and most widely supported format for eBooks on KDP.
Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) – Commonly used, but may have formatting issues with complex layouts.
Kindle Package Format (.kpf) – Created using Kindle Create, ensures best compatibility with Kindle only devices.
HTML (.zip, .htm, .html) – Useful for advanced formatting.
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Plain Text (.txt)
PDF (.pdf) – Only supported for certain languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque).
No one in their right mind would actually upload any format to KDP except a carefully edited ePub version. All other formats uploaded to KDP typically create serious formatting glitches when KDP’s algorithm converts a PDF or RTF to the KDP ePub version. This is why KDP recommends uploading ePubs.
Creating Your Book in MS Word and Uploading to KDP in a DOCX Format is Not The Solution
It is widely repeated on the Internet that you can convert a PDF book into a Word DOCX book and upload that to KDP, but that’s not the whole story. That approach typically has bothersome formatting issues. Let me briefly explain what the problems typically are.
Fixing formatting issues in a Word document converted from PDF—especially in preparation for EPUB export—is not a simple process and does require a solid understanding of Word’s editing and formatting tools. When a PDF is converted to Word, the resulting document often contains a range of formatting problems: inconsistent fonts, broken paragraphs, misplaced images, incorrect heading levels, and more. Cleaning this up for EPUB export involves more than just cosmetic changes. You need to:
Apply consistent styles: Use Word’s built-in styles (Heading 1 for chapters, Heading 2 for sub-sections, Normal for body text, etc.) rather than manual formatting. This is crucial for generating a proper table of contents and for EPUB structure.
Fix paragraph and line spacing: Remove hard returns and tabs, set first-line indents via paragraph settings, and ensure consistent spacing throughout.
Insert page breaks: Ensure each chapter starts on a new page by inserting manual page breaks, not just extra returns.
Check images and tables: Make sure images are set as “inline with text” to avoid unpredictable placement in the EPUB.
Standardize chapter headings: Uniform chapter headings are essential for navigation in EPUB readers.
Review front and back matter: Add or format title pages, copyright, acknowledgments, etc., as needed.
This process can be time-consuming, especially for long or complex books, and does require familiarity with Word’s advanced features like styles, navigation pane, and section breaks. Many users find that the initial conversion from PDF to Word introduces enough errors that significant manual intervention is needed before the document is ready for EPUB export.
Preparing a clean, well-structured Word document for EPUB conversion is a detailed process that goes beyond basic editing and requires a good grasp of Word’s formatting tools and best practices for an eBook’s structure.
BooksOnline does offer a free telephone consultation with authors who have multiple books they want to list at BooksOnline. If you have a final ePub, then no conversion is necessary. If you need some guidance on how to get a non-ePub book in our inventory, and you would like to schedule a telephone call with us, email chuckmarunde@protonmail.com. Please include a link to your current books on Amazon.
Repeated Rumors on The Internet Boast That Calibre Solves All Conversion Problems
Calibre converts a pdf to an ePub, but the final ePub when viewed through an eBook reader or eBook app is a mess, especially when it comes to the copyright page, the table of contents, and often the chapter titles and paragraph formatting. It’s amazing how many techs will simply repeat that Calibre is the solution to converting books without actually having any personal experience using Calibre. Probably the most famous use of Calibre of late has been its ability to strip an ePub of its proprietary DRM (Digital Rights Management).
What is The Best Solution to Getting Your Book in a Perfect ePub Version?
If you’re an author who does not format your own books, or you write them in a generic piece of software not created specifically for authors who write and publish books, like MS Word or another word processor, or God-forbid, Google Docs, you would do well to own Vellum Pub yourself. When you create your book in Vellum, you always have an editable version, and it can be instantly converted into any of the primary formats needed in the publishing world. Vellum also creates specially coded ePubs for Kindle, and it codes generic ePubs without DRM, which readers absolutely love, because they can be easily transferred by readers to their other reading devices and can be read on far more devices and apps than Kindle eBooks with KDP’s DRM.
If you own Vellum, you can import a DOCX (Word) eBook if your book was originally created in Word, and you can edit any formatting glitches that exist in the Word eBook right inside of Vellum. Working within Vellum you can instantly see how the eBook and the print edition will appear in it’s final format. In fact, Vellum shows you how it will look on an iPad, an iPhone, a Nook, a Kindle Fire, a Kindle Paperwhite, a Komo Clara, and an Android tablet.
Using Vellum is unquestionably the best approach for serious authors, unless you’ve been using Scrivener for years and all your books are formatted in Scrivener. As far as I’m concerned, there are only two serious competitors in the software world for serious authors, and those are Scrivener and Vellum. I used Scrivener for years, but found it far too complicated with too many features I didn’t need, and Vellum is super easy to use, yet very powerful. Vellum requires an Apple desktop or laptop, and there is not a Windows version, but I don’t care if you are a Windows fanatic, buy an Apple laptop and purchase Vellum for a one-time cost of $249 and quite fooling around. If you’re not willing to do those two things, I would assume you have no faith in your ability to write books and sell books. A serious author should not be setting small goals that won’t pay for the software and hardware. You should be setting goals to make at least $2,000 per month in net royalties. You can start with smaller goals, of course, but if you’re not going to sell 200 to 300 books every month, what are you doing? Don’t think small. Think big. And this means investing in yourself to achieve your goals in the long-term.
If you don’t mind spending hours upon hours and days trying to get your book formatted correctly from a pdf conversion into Word, and if frustration doesn’t cause you stress and anxiety, and you hate yourself when you look in a mirror, then go ahead and ding around with a pdf, Word, Calibre, and other online programs all claiming they will convert your books and create ePubs for you. Good luck with all of that, because I’ve been there, done that, and it’s nothing but a pit of despair. Vellum ended all that nonsense for me. That’s why I’m so big on Vellum. It does everything right, easily, and creates any book format I need with no glitches and no formatting problems.
I’m not here to sell you on Vellum, but if you’re serious as an author and you intend to write more books and sell many books, do you really want to fool around for years? You wouldn’t take your car to a mechanic who refuses to purchase the basic tools to work on your car, right? Why would you want to be an author without the correct tools to produce beautifully formatted books?
Can an Author Contract to Have His eBook Converted to an ePub?
You would think this would be a readily available service today on the Internet, but you can spend hours literally searching the Internet for someone who advertises that they will convert your pdf into an ePub or convert your MS Word doc into an ePub, all the while retaining its perfect original formatting. Programmers are inexpensive in India, and I’ve worked with some great, smart, and inexpensive Indian programmers, but if you expect them to be proficient in English and in English grammar, think again. They won’t recognize or know how to repair blatant formatting problems with your final ePub. Then you’re back to square one.
What do I do as an author? I create my books in Vellum, design my books in Vellum, edit my books in Vellum, proofread my books in Vellum, and export my perfect ePubs for KDP and BooksOnline from Vellum.
Does BooksOnline have a conversion service for authors who want to host their books at BooksOnline?
No, we do not. Converting books that were originally formatted in a variety of formats with a variety of software created by hundreds of programmers with different ideas has created a chaotic world out there for eBook conversions. If you’re a technician par excellence, and you love to spend hour after hour editing html code or plinking around in conversion programs like Caliber, going back to Word to change H1 or H2 titles or fixing fonts or paragraphs and then going back to Calibre to convert and then viewing it on an ePub reader to see if you need to make more corrections in Word again, great! Do that for an hour or two and ask yourself if you want to do that for all your future books. The vast majority of authors like to put their true gifts and skills to work writing books. As much as BooksOnline would like to help authors convert a pdf or other formats into useable and editable versions for creating beautiful ePubs, each conversion would have to be custom programming and editing. It would be far easier and cheaper for an author to purchase the Apple laptop and Vellum and create original masterpieces that can then be uploaded to Amazon, BooksOnline, and elsewhere, and can always be easily edited and re-uploded.
BooksOnline does offer a free telephone consultation with authors who have multiple books they want to list at BooksOnline. If you have a final ePub, then no conversion is necessary. If you need some guidance on how to get a non-ePub book in our inventory, and you would like to schedule a telephone call with us, email chuckmarunde@protonmail.com. Please include a link to your current books on Amazon.
