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MS Word to MOBI in 7 Steps on Windows Platform

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Here is a simple method showing how to convert your book from MS Word into a MOBI file for Amazon Kindles. If you have a lot of photos and pictures, or weird layouts then this won’t be quite right for you, but if you have a text or fiction book with a few pictures this should be fine.

  1. Make sure your book is nice and tidy in MS Word first. That you have consistent fonts, and not too many of them etc. If you are planning to load the .MOBI to Amazon then you don’t need to have the cover in the file as this is loaded separately and added to the file by Amazon.
  2. Use the ‘save as’ option to save as type ‘Web Page Filtered’.
  3. Download Amazon’s KindleGen program (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211). Get the latest version. Save it to the same directory/folder as the html file you created in step 2.
  4. Create a new text file and call it runkindlegen.bat. Put the following text into it (change the two names “your html file from step2.htm” and “your book name.mobi”) and save the file. @echo off “kindlegen.exe” “your html file from step2.htm” -c2 -o “your book name.mobi” -verbose pause
  5. To create the .MOBI just double-click on the runkindlegen.bat file you have created. It will open a small black command window and as ‘verbose’ is set it will list any errors, warnings and information messages on the screen.
  6. Go through the messages and look for any that start Wxxx or Exxx. You can ignore the ones that start Ixxxx as these are just for information. If you don’t include a cover file then there will be at least one warning message for the missing cover. For any other messages check to see what the problem is and if you can fix it.
  7. Download and install Amazon’s Kindle Previewer (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765261), and use it to check the .MOBI file loads and reads ok.

And that’s it. The KindleGen program page (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211) has some help options if you want to control the formatting a bit more.

Good luck.

Originally posted to wordpress.com on 17 September 2014.

Note. Amazon’s KindleGen program is no longer available to download from them. This has been replaced with the Kindle Previewer.

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