Dan Grec was a software engineer who gave it all up for adventures of a different kind. Now he drives his Jeep all around the world living the life he’d always dreamed of. He’s also published a couple of books on his adventures. Since he’s familiar and comfortable with computers, he decided that he’d publish them himself and sell them on Amazon.
While Amazon will give you some tools to help you get your book into their supported formats, you’re mostly on your own. That means you have to produce camera ready PDF for the physical copies and .mobi files for the ebooks. If you’ve never written a book, you have no idea how many tedious details and chores the publisher handles: copy editing, editorial advice, production, design and production of the front and back covers, and much more. When you self publish, all those responsibilities fall on you.
Grec has a long post on how wrote and produced his books. Because he cares about production values and wanted his books to look professionally produced, he decided against using Word and produced LaTeX source instead. He used Pandoc to convert that to PDF and .epub files. He used an Amazon tool to convert the .epub files to the .mobi files required by Amazon.
The post provides the details of his work flow including how he generated both formats from the same source. That’s not quite as trivial as it seems because some aspects of the LaTeX markup are different depending on the target format. Grec used an Eclipse plugin for the actual editing but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done with Org mode from the comfort of Emacs.
If you’ve ever considered writing a book and selling it through Amazon, Grec’s post is a worthwhile read.