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I would like to self-publish a book and sell it through Amazon, and also make it available in a variety of electronic formats.

I recently bought a book for $35 as an electronic download from the author's own website. It was a great book, about exactly what I was interested in. There were a few imperfections in the formatting, but I didn't mind because I was devouring the content. It was a simple pdf, with letter-sized pages.

Shall I do that?

Would that mean I would have to have two versions of my book, one with 6 x 9 inch pages, and one with letter-sized pages?

Or is there some way of making a pdf from a 6 x 9 inch Word file?

I did not bother printing out the $35 book I downloaded. I just read it on my computer.

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  • Would you just save two files of the same thing using the two different formats as PDFs directly from Word?
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2
    Commented Jan 7, 2017 at 19:34
  • @Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 - That's what I'm trying to figure out. Do you have a suggestion?
    – aparente001
    Commented Jan 7, 2017 at 23:16
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    Check out the ebook-specific SE ebooks.stackexchange.com
    – idiotprogrammer
    Commented Jan 22, 2017 at 22:30

2 Answers 2

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(SE has a separate section for ebook questions: https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/ )

You cannot sell PDFs on Amazon. You need to make the ebook an epub or .mobi file.

The 6x9 format you speak of is probably based on an epub file which can be viewable in any size or dimension using reflowable text.

If you already have an audience for your ebook, one option might be to sell the PDF directly using a paypal link. Or you might use a service like Scribd or Payloadz or a service listed here: https://www.quora.com/Digital-Publishing-What-is-the-simplest-way-to-sell-single-PDFs-online

Another easy option is to pay someone to format the ebook for amazon and other places (it would cost in the 250-400$ range).

Another option is to purchase a one month subscription to Adobe InDesign and create a PDF and export it to epub/mobi files.

Believe it or not, publishing simultaneously in a print-ready format and ebook format is a technical challenge, and nobody has really found an ideal solution yet. I personally really like the PDF solution because so many people have tablets to read things on. But PDFs don't work on phones or smaller devices.

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  • "But PDFs don't work on phones or smaller devices" Of course, they do, you can even view them in Dropbox.
    – Lew
    Commented Jan 23, 2017 at 16:34
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Amazon have very specific requirements for formatting books that are published through KDP. (Kindle). Take a look at the guidelines here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A17W8UM0MMSQX6

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