And this is how I did it, I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but this worked for me.
Step 1: Write your book in a word processor like MS Word or OpenOffice. It doesn't really matter how it is saved I guess as long as you can copy and paste the entire text.
Step 2: download a free program called Crimson Editor (available at crimsoneditor.com)
Step 3: goto agoodread.com and look in the lower right corner of the screen. There you see a place to input your name and email to get the Kindle eBook macro. The macro will be used in the crimson editor and all the information about installing it and using it are on the agoodread.com website which is provided by the creator: Judith Tramayne. Trust me, if you do your eBook my way, you'll want this macro in your crimson editor.
Step 4: run the crimson editor, open your book file (in Word or OpenOffice or whatever), cut and paste the entire text of the book from the book file to the crimson editor.
Step 5: Okay, here's where the tough part starts. Follow the video tutorial on how to use the macro in crimson editor from the agoodread.com site. It shows you quickly the different steps to adding html code to the book. The point of what you are doing, as Judith Tramayne says, is to create a CLEAN html file of your book. The CLEAN part being the important part, as it removes unnecessary things. Let me tell you why we're doing all of this. I tried to simply use both an .odt and a .pdf format file of my book to submit at first before trying it this other way with a clean html file. The other ways the submitted file resulted in a horrible looking book. It just didn't work. So, I recommend highly doing it the Judith Tramayne way. The only bad thing is that doing this takes a looonnngggg time. My book is 396 pages (like 128,500 words) and going through the whole thing and making a clean html file took me like 4 days, working for hours and hours each day. Thankfully I had the whole week off for vacation when I was doing it so I was able to get it done. Also when doing this (adding the code macros) you need to check your work frequently to make sure it is coming out right. To do this just save your html file in crimson editor-like onto the desktop-and open up the html file in your browser so you can see it (I use firefox). It won't be exactly like a Kindle eBook reader output but it is fairly close. The thing that iritated me the most when coding was putting words into italics. You just gotta be extremely careful and precise to make sure you get it right, or else things will come out messed up. (simply typing in a word processor is so much easier compared to this).
Step 6: Okay now that you've spent several days adding all the macros/html code to the book's text and you've checked to make sure it looks okay, we now have 2 options: add a table of contents or not. I think that if you have a real short book then a contents page could be skipped. But for my book, which has 23 chapters, a contents page was a necessity. This part for me was hard to figure out because finding the information on how to do it isn't easy on the Internet. What I usually did find was so convoluted or complex to understand that even I couldn't figure it out (and I have a computer science degree). I don't understand why people can't just do what I'm doing here and explain things simply. (BTW: Judith Tramyne sells the information on how to add a table of contents to the html you've made for like $70.00 or something which for me wasn't an option as that's just way too expensive.) Anyway, I finally found out enough by looking around at different websites to make my own contents. And here's an example of the way I did my book:
(In this example we have a prologue and 11 chapters, but it works for however many chapters you have)
<div id=”toc”>
<p><a name="home"><h3>Contents:</h3></a>
<p><a href="#Prologue:">Prologue: name of prologue</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap01">Chapter 1 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap02">Chapter 2 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap03">Chapter 3 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap04">Chapter 4 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap05">Chapter 5 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap06">Chapter 6 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap07">Chapter 7 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap08">Chapter 8 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap09">Chapter 9 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap10">Chapter 10 name of chapter</a></p>
<p><a href="#chap11">Chapter 11 name of chapter</a></p>
</div>
<mbp:pagebreak />
There are a few special considerations on this for it to work properly which I learned; the code inside <> is blue in color (like <p>, </p>, etc.)
The href are red in color, (if it isn't red, then something is wrong. you need to rewrite it)
The "#chap05" or "#chap11" or whatever chapter number you have are purplish in color, (if it isn't purple, like it is black instead, then it needs to be rewritten)
Basically the colors are blue, red, purple and black. I guess this is a way to tell in the crimson editor if the html has been coded correctly. If you write up a contents like my example above but its all just black in the crimson editor, then it's not going to work correctly. (at least it didn't for me. I had to rewrite some of the lines to make them work.) What will happen is, when you save the file in crimson editor and view the html file, you will see links which will look like this:
Contents:
Prologue: name of prologueChapter 1 name of chapter
Chapter 2 name of chapter
Chapter 3 name of chapter
Chapter 4 name of chapter
Chapter 5 name of chapter
Chapter 6 name of chapter
Chapter 7 name of chapter ...etc.
These chapters above will be clickable links that take you directly to the chapter number. That's basically it to adding a table of contents, pure and simple. In addition to this I also added links from the start of each chapter to return the reader to the contents page. If you want to do this just add the code:
<p><a href="#home">Top of Page</a></p>
just after the chapter headings. Here's an example:
<mbp:pagebreak />
<br />
<a name="chap01"><center><h3>Chapter 1</h3></center></a>
<p><center><b>name of chapter</b></center></p>
<p><a href="#home">Top of Page</a></p>
<br />
When you do this it puts a clickable Top of Page under the chapter name that if clicked returns you to the beginning of the book at the Contents. My book has a prologue and 23 chapters, so I have 24 of these in my book. This might sound crazy, but when you see it it makes sense. At least to me it does, so I used it.
Step 7: Okay, let's assume you've gotten this far and have a clean, saved, coded and macroed html file of your book. Now we need to change it from html into eBook format. The eBook format is .prc. I discovered by looking around on the Internet something called mobipocket.com I wasn't familiar with the Mobipockets before this but apparently these are eBook readers/telephones/ etc. Anyway, on the mobipocket.com site they have software you can download free for both reading eBooks on the PC and also creating eBooks from your document files. Mobipocket reader, and Mobipocket Creator respectably. I recommend getting creator, but the reader I don't (I use Kindle for PC you can get for free from Amazon.com for eBook reading on my PC). Okay run creator. Click "Import from existing file . html document" I tried using Adobe PDF but it came out looking horrible. Put your file in "choose a file" and click "import". This creates a new folder and takes you to a new page. (the name of your destination folder is at the top of the screen in blue to the right of the red book. Click cover image and click add a cover image if you have one, other wise skip this. Also, if you have any graphics images in your book you need to add them in here too. You can do this by dragging them in to this page, which I recommend as it seemed to work best for me, or clicking add file and finding them. Okay once you have the html file, cover image, and all other files you click on "Build" at the top. Next page says Build Publication. I didn't use any compression or encryption and just clicked "Build" below & the program built my .prc file and put it into the file folder listed up in the blue above like I mentioned before. This .prc file is what you will be submitting to Kindle.
Step 8: goto kdp.amazon.com This is the kindle website for Amazon.com. Sign-in with your Amazon.com account & password and follow the steps to self-publish your book. Once you are ready to upload your newly created eBook choose the .prc file you created and upload it along with a cover image if desired. (As in my paperback book I created my own cover image). Once you're done with this and you've submitted your files they review the files to make sure they are okay. This takes a day or two. Once they are done reviewing the files go "live" and you start selling.
That's about it on making an eBook. At least that was the path I took. My book came out, after much effort and redoing things over and over several times, looking pretty good. If you have a better and easier way that actually works good then I bow to you. But the way I've outlined above is I think the best way to do this without having to pay someone else to either do it for you or tell you how to do it. I found out everything that I posted above myself on the Internet for free and paid not one red cent for anything. The only thing it cost me was the time to get it done, which was a good deal of time, but time I have. So anyway, good luck in writing your own eBook whether you follow my way or find a way of your own.
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