Saturday, February 23, 2019

How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip now out as a Kindle

Some time back, my wife and I published our medieval cookbook, How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip. In addition to making it available as a paperback on Amazon, I also put a pdf of it up on my web page for anyone who wanted to download.

It recently occurred to me that it would get much more visibility on Amazon, and that some people would find a kindle more convenient than a pdf. I put the question to people on Facebook, and quite a lot of them said they would like it as a kindle. 

So I converted my Word document to a kindle, using Calibre, a free conversion program. It's a nice program, and their technical support is fast and helpful. Despite that I ran into a lot of different problems, with the result that the conversion took something like ten to twenty hours, about ten times as long as I had expected. But it's now done and up on Amazon, and has sold thirteen copies in the last two days.

For those not familiar with it, the book consists of all of the cooking material from the Miscellany that Elizabeth and I have self-published for a very long time. It contains over three hundred medieval and renaissance recipes, in each case with the original (or a translation) and our worked out version. In addition there are articles on topics related to period cooking. I assume that most but not all of our customers will be fellow SCA members.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

FYI, there's another program (pandoc) that can also convert from Word to other formats. If you need to convert additional things, it might be worth looking into.

--Adam

pe51ter said...

I regularly send pdfs to my KINDLE. Each Kindle account has its own email address, so if you send an email with a pdf attached the pdf will load into the kindle just like any book purchased from Amazon. And you don't need to give the email a title.

David Friedman said...

How do you find the email address of your kindle account?

When the pdf loads, does it still have the fixed page layout of the original pdf?

Simon Andersson said...

How to find the email:

From the Account and Lists menu, choose Contents and Devices. Then click the Devices tab. Choose the relevant device. Device information is then displayed, including he email associated with the device.