How to get started with making a Kindle book

I understand the general idea of a Kindle eBook, but there are a lot of details to be worked out.  After poking around on the Amazon Kindle site for a while, it pointed me to "Building Your Book for Kindle" (the Kindle edition, obviously), which is free.  That was a good overview.

A friend pointed me to "The Ultimate Guide to Publishing Your eBook on Amazon’s Kindle Platform" which also has so helpful comments.

The Kindle Direct Publishing site has a page that seems to suggest that Kindle will take lots of formats: Types of Formats. 

But the biggest problem is how to prepare the book for uploading?  The Kindle book  and the blog both suggest using Microsoft Word to create the book, but then at the end of the process say to just use Word to generate an HTML document.  That's stupid.  I know how to write HTML.  (By which I mean simple HTML, like HTML 1.0, not complicated stuff like HTML 5).  And after considerable trouble getting everything formatted in Word, the HTML it generates is awful.  So I'll just do my own HTML.

Once that is decided, the Types of Formats page mentioned above has a link to an HTML page.  And that lists two links that really get down to the nitty-gritty:

• Supported HTML Tags
•  Custom HTML Tags Supported

The first lists all the HTML tags that Kindle supports, and the second has the missing magic one for forcing a page break: <mbp:pagebreak />

Since our book has both text and images (figures), the guidelines say to make a directory with the one HTML file and all it's figures.  Then zip that up into a single zipped file and upload the zipped file.

The Kindle help page "Basic HTML Formatting Guidelines" gives some additional tips.  In particular it shows how to get your HTML files back from Kindle.  When I did that, after uploading the zip file as suggested, I got back a zip file that consisted of two directories:  (a) html and (b) images.  The single HTML file was in the html directory, and the images were all in the images directory.  All the references to the images had been modified to be "../images/xxx" instead of xxx.  (If they wanted this structure, it is closer to what I normally do to start with, so making the flat directory to zip seems  like an unnecessary step, if they are just going to reverse it.)

The other changes to the HTML file were:

•  My original code to select a 32 point font size was changed from <span style='font-size:32.0pt'> to <span style='font-size:2.67rem' >
• All my <p> paragraph tags were closed with </p> tags (just before the next <p> tag).

So doing HTML directly seems like the right thing to do, at least in my case.