Publishing books with LibreOffice, CreateSpace, and KDP

Kindle Direct Publishing

You will first need access to Amazon's eBook publishing platform. If you are an Amazon customer, you can simply log in with your Amazon account. Otherwise, KDP will ask for the usual type of contact information. Then, you can begin with your e-book project. Fortunately, you will find assistance along the way.

The book printing assistant in CreateSpace asked you at the conclusion of that process whether you wanted to publish the book with KDP. You should return to this point and transfer the book project to KDP. The advantage of this method as opposed to starting out fresh with KDP is that you don't need to do anything more about the book cover and the book data.

You should ignore the option of generating and sending a PDF file. Instead, you should retroactively carry over the actual book content manually from the file that was exported in HTML format.

Based on personal experience, I recommend that users avoid a PDF transfer if their book includes formulas and tables. This is because transfers from CreateSpace to KDP can hang up.

Back to the Printed Version

Therefore, you should first log in again to CreateSpace and re-open the book project you have published. You will find the Publish on Kindle entry waiting (Figure 14).

Figure 14: CreateSpace makes it possible to immediately export a completed book project to Kindle Direct Publishing.

This link leads to the website for the Kindle publishing service. As it turns out, the publication process for KDP is also an option in CreateSpace when the book project is in the proofreading stage. At this point, you can simply select Take me to Kindle Direct Publishing now .

Next, you will need to tell CreateSpace how it should transfer the content of the book. The service provides an explicit warning that the PDF file format is not optimal. Therefore, you should select the I will upload a separate interior file to KDP alternative and then upload the HTML data which has been exported from LibreOffice.

Before the actual publication process on KDP begins, you will need to establish the rights to your book and decide whether the book should be protected with digital rights management. Following this, CreateSpace transfers the book as a new e-book project to KDP, where it will instantly appear in your KDP account tagged with a CreateSpace icon.

Now you can click on the new book title and start making the e-book come alive. Amazon should report that the cover was successfully transferred from CreateSpace and that the process of uploading the file containing the contents can begin. For this, select the Zip file created from the Office export and upload it.

Amazon offers a preview once the upload is complete to show how the e-book looks on various versions of Kindle e-book readers (Figure 15). For the foreseeable future, Amazon will only be supporting Kindle devices. Nonetheless, it is possible to download and test the e-book file on other readers or in e-book software like Calibre.

Figure 15: After the data import, Amazon provides a preview showing how the book looks on various Kindle devices.

If you like the results of the preview, the next step is for Amazon to again make sure that you have the necessary publication rights. Then, as with CreateSpace, you will see the option for setting up the royalties. Amazon then takes over, vets the book, and usually within 24 hours puts it on a virtual sales rack.