TLDR: This is a post about how I (eventually) got decent results publishing sheet music on KDP. (The Amazon self-publishing website).
At the end of 2019 I published a book called "the Rhythmic Psalter". It was basically a collection of psalms crunched into ten verses each, suitable for busy people or people who want to dip into the book of psalms. I published it via Kindle Direct, as that seemed nice and easy - and it was. I downloaded a Word template which I edited with the text in Pages (I have a Mac), after editing I converted my text to a Word document, uploaded the text to Kindle Direct Publishing, looked at the proof and corrected it, and pressed a button to publish. Easy peasy! And people could buy it from that moment onwards.
Meanwhile I was working on a music edition of the same book. That was a totally different story. First I made the music images on Sibelius and exported them as tiffs at 600dpi so they would be good quality. Then I imported them into the same Pages template I had used before. When I was ready I made the Kindle version of the book. I tried exporting from Pages as an ebook but that didn't work so well. So then I tried using the Kindle online publishing gadget which worked very well indeed. Once again it was very easy and user friendly.
And so, now to the hard part, and the reason why I am writing this blog post. I guess that I might not be the only person who has had this problem, and this is how I solved it. I don't know the technicalities why this worked and why other things didn't work. But this worked for me and I hope it works for you too!
First, the problem: When I converted the Pages file to (either - I tried both!) a doc or a pdf (a beautiful high resolution pdf!) and uploaded to KDP to make a print book, the music looked dreadful, like a bad photocopy with lines missing and fuzzy notes. These were not low resolution images when they went up, but they were dire when they came back down as a pdf proof.
I read the instructions and it said that if I wanted to improve these images I would need to change the settings in Word so that the images were not compressed. I couldn't find a way to do that in Pages so I did a test with a friend who had Word and it seemed a bit better, so I got a Word licence for my Mac. Thankfully Word runs native on a Mac now without having to use Parallels so it didn't slow the machine down like it used to do in the olden days.
I also read somewhere in the small print that the Kindle Direct Publishing doesn't like Tiffs, so I went back into Sibelius and exported the images as png files instead. After doing some tweaking in Word to make everything look right, I uploaded....
...the proof came back with the images looking good (hooray!) but the formatting all wrong. Basically I had written my book in Gill Sans and the gadget (presumably because it couldn't find the Gill Sans font) substituted Times New Roman which shot the formatting to pieces.
I read up some more, and discovered that if I embedded my font in the file that would work...I did this, and it didn't work, but I noticed that parts of the document where I had used Calibri were fine, so I just gave up and used Calibri for the whole thing. It was near enough to satisfy me, and didn't wreck my formatting.
Then I uploaded a proof. Everything looked lovely, apart from the larger music files with accompaniments at the front of the book. For some weird reason they looked bad even though they were pngs.
So I spent 8 hours flipping between Word, and KDP proofing, and Sibelius, exporting different files with different boxes ticked on Sibelius, and doing all kinds of things with images (including conversions to various things including jpgs and screenshots - I was getting desperate!) and this was what I discovered...
Pngs for these larger pieces of music just didn't work. I don't know why, but vector graphics files did, but only with certain settings ticked. So I exported the larger music files as vector graphics files (SVG) and imported those into Word. I had to crop them a bit in image editing as they had white borders, but that was OK. I then proofed and FINALLY the music was looking OK. I also had to keep doing re-proofing because, in Word, various things kept slipping onto other pages, and sometimes there were random word breaks which didn't exist in the original file, but that was fine in comparison to my previous problems.
Therefore in conclusion I recommend these tactics:
1 - When making a book which includes SHEET MUSIC in Kindle Direct Publishing, use Word to create your original document and set the image resolution so that it is full resolution. To help get your graphics properly lined-up tick the gridlines box (under "view")
2 - When you make your images in Sibelius export them as png files at 600 DPI.
3 - Use a set font from a book template such as Calibri to write the text sections of your book.
4 - If png doesn't work, try exporting from Sibelius as a vector graphics file (SVG). In Sibelius export options for SVG do tick the "lines and breaks" boxes, but DO NOT tick antialiasing box or the monochrome box.
5 - When you import your SVG files to Word they will have white borders. Use the "Crop" images function to crop them down to the border of your music. (Click on your image and you will get the "Graphics format" menu). It is under there.
6 - If you are having problems getting your text to wrap around these images the way you want it to, there is a "wrap text" menu. I set mine to "top and bottom" and I also ticked "lock anchor" when I had the image where I wanted it. I also unticked "allow overlap" when I was fiddling with the image.
7 - I then saved the book as a Word document and uploaded to KDP, proofed and finally I was done!
