Ghost Town Sage

Amazon eBook Fiasco

This shouldn't take ten days.

I was trying to upload an eBook to Amazon last month. The print version of the book is already posted, so the simplest thing to do is to use the same PDF for the eBook. This isn't optimum but it'll work short term until I can create a real ePub. No matter how it's uploaded, Amazon will try to convert it to their KPF format. So I let it have a go, but then when I viewed the Preview version, the contents were horribly butchered. All the text, pictures & pages were run together without regard to formatting. When I was younger my mom had a gadget that would grind different cuts of meat into sausages. This is what Amazon was doing to my book. This worked previously, so I don't know what was different this time. This simple task should have taken half an hour, but ended up stretching into a ten day fiasco.

My first thought was to upload an ePub file instead of PDF. The ePub is more similar to Amazon's KPF format so I thought it might work better. I'm using Affinity Publisher, so I checked into whether it can output an ePub. It doesn't, it can only out put an afPub or PDF.

I also have Libre Writer, and it can output a PDF, DOC, ePub, Html, and others. But Libre is a bit clunky with large documents, and I don't want to recreate my entire 200 page document again. So I tried it out by building up just the front section and first chapter of book. Turns out the ePub output was corrupt and useless, which I confirmed was a problem on Google.

So I looked further into Affinity to see if ePub output is an option somehow. Turns out I have version 2, which doesn't do ePub, but version 3 can output an ePub. But I don't want to buy the upgrade just for that. So digging some more, it appears the upgrade from 2 to 3 is free. Turns out, Serif had sold Affinity to Canva last year, and Canva is selling Ver-3 for free.

But I have to create a Canva account first. I already have a Serif account and the Canva web site says that earlier accounts will automatically transfer over. It didn't, and there's no where on the web site where I can tell it to transfer over. So I tried to create a new account, but Canva wouldn't send the activation code.

Four tries and two support posts went nowhere. I tried sending questions to Canva, Serif, and my mail host, asking what happened to the activation code. I never got a reply from any of them. As is typical, it looks like I can't send a support question unless I already have an account, which means I can't ask why my account isn't working. And there is also not chat, forum or community where I can post a question. Canva is very vague about the Serif accounts and Ver 2, and appears to have purged the word Serif from the web site. So I don't know what going on.

Canva Affinity is a dead end at this point. So I checked into several other publishing programs and downloaded Scribus Publisher, which is free. This has features comparable to Affinity, but turns out it also doesn't do ePub. I should have checked that before I downloaded it. I also looked into Xara Publisher, but this time I checked first and it doesn't do ePub either.

The ePub file format is basically just a web page that's zipped together with the pictures. I hand-coded this web site in a plain text editor, and I could probably do the same for an ePub in an afternoon. The only reason why I don't is that the ePub has a few extra details that might end up being big roadblocks.

I'm thinking, hand-coding an ePub would be a last resort, but the fact is, if I had started this on day 1, I would have had an eBook on Amazon on day 2. This was going no where, so I decided it's time to actually troubleshoot the problem, rather than trying to find someone else's software to fix it.

As I was taking the garbage to the dumpster, I realized that Amazon might be trying to turn my PDF into a Reflow-Doc, instead of Fixed-Format. So I reloaded the PDF again and tried to force it to a Fixed format. But Amazon never gave me the option to convert it to Fixed format, it insisted on loading it as Reflow and rejected it, saying I'm not allowed to convert a PDF to a Reflow document.

So it looks like I have two options at this point:
(a) download Amazon's KPF creator and recreate the entire book again. I'm not going to do that. I will still have to create an ePub for the other book servers, and if I do that, I can upload that ePub to Amazon.
(b) A better plan is to use Libre Writer to recreate the document from scratch. Libre can output an HTML doc, which doesn't quite work, but with the formatting in place the rest is easily editable. The ePub requires two other support files, so I'll send off the package and see what Amazon thinks about that.

This is 2026, it shouldn't be this hard to create an ePub.

This will be updated shortly.
M. Henry June 2026.