Using pages to publish on Kindle

Question

I would like to create an ebook on pages and publish it for Kindle on Amazon.  Is is possible to preview the book on my kindle BEFORE I publish?  The amazon site makes it sound like the only way to do this (for Mac users) is to know HTML and use Kindle Gen.  I hope that is not true!
Kate

Answer 1

First of all, I'm starting with regular Kindle.  Not for Kindle Fire yet.  So these are for the basic Kindle that most people have.  Kindle Fire has other options, like the use of color and such that I might take advantage of.  But this book is not printed in color so I didn't utilize color.
I did not reset my side margins.  I removed the top and bottom margins, setting them to 0 because Kindle defines them, not the document.
Tiffs are fine BUT are huge in file size.  The image files cannot be huge because they will not load properly and could crash the Kindle.  My book, printed, is 8x10x440 pages with 27 full page b&w images and THOUSANDS of links with 954 anchors.  That's a lot of book.  That's even MORE ebook.  So concession must be made for the sake of the ebook on any non Kindle Fire ebook.  And remember too, that it seems that all the different readers have different specs.  I'm starting with Kindle and working my way out.  It's a major p.i.t.a. in general but not nearly as painful as I thought in Pages.  Actually, Pages simplifies the process a LOT.
Considering that the images are b&w (mine are to start with) and you know how to convert a color image into a great b&w image in Photoshop by doing more than simply desaturating it (I know how to do that...simply desaturating will turn a color such as red to black so it looks awful.  There is a simple process to convert, but desaturating is not it.) Why use a huge file like a tif for a b&w graphic?  It is simply ego and not common sense.  A gif that is set for 16 shades of grey, dithered and then saved at 300 dpi then resized down will look utterly amazing.  AND and the file size is quite small in comparison to a tiff.  AND a jpg isn't even as clear.  Other images will work...but they weigh down the file.  And my file data, alone is huge.  And the images are simply iimages....for looks not information.  That part is up to the writer.  You experiment.  This is what works for my book.
I insert the image at 300 dpi, into Pages...it's big.  I resize it manually from there.  Especially for the smaller images like fancy drop caps, that after I look at the document on my Kindle itself, I may want to adjust a bit.  Which is easily done in the original document, rather than having to redo the image, etc.
I have examined my Kindle ebook by downloading the converted file from KDP and installing it on my Kindle and I fudge around with it from there.  It looks amazing.  the links all work (which is what I was stressing over) and I can't believe it was SOOOO much easier using Pages than other apps that I tried on the Mac and on the PC's (which make me crazy). 
I've been fortunate to not have to do a lot of fixing in the HTML file that must be downloaded from KDP because the Pages HTML file is pathetic, so I don't even mess with that ever.
KDP is NOT converting and fixing my formatting.  There is nothing to fix.  The book looked the same when I put the document on my Kindle BEFORE I uploaded it to KDP.  After I loaded it onto KDP.  After I downloaded it as a book from Kindle.  I'm quite impressed.  I'm ready to do my others now.  That was the MOST complex of the books, and the largest.
The others are novels, poetry.  Such and such.  But the real challenge with Kindle now, and I will also publish it on iPad, etc. will be a young child's book that is in color, will have media and all that for Kindle Fire and other such devices.  I have yet to take on that challenge.  It's an entirely different animal. 
When I was first starting my project (back when I had began it in Appleworks and then moved it to Pages midway) I was reading all the negativity and began to panic.  I almost bought Word.  But then I experimented with Word on one of the kid's PC's and it was so complicated and I thought this isn't going to be any better.  I tried NeoOffice and it could not handle the size of my document with all it's links.  I tried some other wp program Abi something or another and it was so slow with such a large document it could barely scroll to the bottom of a page.  Taking it up into Calibre was a joke.  Etc., etc. 
I am still using Pages 1 for crying out loud!  My computer is so obsolete and my memory is limited.  I need a new machine badly.  But it was all handled quite well. 
The one big problem that I had with this particular document is that because my memory is so low, I have 768MB of Ram (which is laughable) and cannot add more because I have a Powerbook 13" and it cannot go up more than that.  I could not export into a PDF file for Create Space.  I freAKeD!  I called Create Space and they told me to download their template, which is a Word template and use that.  So I did.  I downloaded their template, opened it in Pages, copy pasted my entire book into it from my original Pages document and then if you cannot, for any reason, convert to a PDF you simply upload THAT document made in the template to Create Space and it automatically converts to a PDF within their system.  Like magic.  Whew!  One really good thing about that template is that it has a TOC box that I used and it worked better than the Pages TOC did.  So I copied pasted that box into other documents and my goto TOC :-D
You gotta' do whatcha' gotta' do.  Thank goodness there are work arounds when needed.  However, I've found that MANY folks will tell you how to build a clock when you ask for the time.
This book was an education.  From there on it will be easy.
I hope I clarified.
Peace.