From Blog to Book 1: A Small Step Forward

I try to set my goals low enough that I cannot help exceed them.  I have a lot more fun this way and always feel good about the results.  Forget about sales and prices.  My current writing goal is to go through the motions and just get an e-book out there; that appears to be a hard enough task for me.  Of course I have to do everything the difficult way.

I write a company blog called Waves for my family's firm and have composed quite a few yachting articles (143 at last count) over the last 2 1/2 years.  Because of the excellent discussions here, I have been inspired to create a "Best Of" selection of my 2010 articles.  Even though I know no one will ever read  my book, I still am anxious to get through the process.  I consider publishing an e-book a worthwhile learning experience.

After a month of procrastination, I received an email from Mike about writing a blog post for today, the 18th.  That finally spurred me on to take some real steps towards getting out an e-book.  I searched and found the Kindle Self-Publishing site ( https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin ) which probably is familiar to many of you out there.  The instructions seemed pretty straight forward, and, as far as I can tell so far, there are no fees to submit a book?  Though there is a curious royalty choice that in a future post I will touch on.

Everything was straight forward until I got to the part about actually uploading my book.  My content is in a funny format as I usually write out by hand my notes and then type them up directly into WordPress, the software suite that powers my blog.  Kindle's recommended way to format your book is to compose the content in Microsoft Word and then save in web format.  Then there is a program called MobiCreator ( http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscreator.asp ) that converts the web page into a .mobi file which is accepted by Kindle.

I have a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering, so I thought maybe I can do this in a more convenient way?  I dreaded converting whatever 20 or so best blog posts and putting them in Word.  It seems like a common enough idea to convert a selection of your WordPress posts into a format suitable to publish as an e-book.  I looked through the WordPress plugins online and stumbled on Anthologize ( http://anthologize.org ).  It seems like the perfect solution, but unfortunately it is not finished yet and does not work.

So here I am procrastinating again about what to do.  I wonder what program(s) others use who have published e-books through Kindle.  Do you use Word and MobiCreator as Kindle recommends?  What do you recommend as tools for e-publishing?

I cannot set my goals any lower, so I am stuck here.  It looks like I have to man up and actually put in some time and thought into figuring the best way to go from WordPress blog to Kindle book.

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