Announcing: convert your inklewriter story to Kindle

So, you've written a twisty, turning interactive story. You're done, but you still don't have something you can hold in your hand. There's one thing missing, and that's the ebook version. Wouldn't it be great if you could read your story on your Kindle, or even sell it through Amazon's self-publishing service?

You guessed it. Now you can.

It's taken a few twists of the spanner and a bit of head-scratching, but we've figured out a way to take inklewriter stories - with all their branches, conditionals, counters, logic, and joins, and [turn them into plain old ebooks](/content/inklewriter/create-an-ebook "Producing an ebook"/index.html) with links that can be read on a Kindle device.

What this means is, if you write an inklewriter story, you'll be fill out a few details, including the share link of your story, and receive back from us a file ready for your Kindle, Kindle app on mobile or desktop. You'll also be able to upload it the Amazon store to give away free or sell.

How to get started

If you've already written a story, you can get started straight away: just visit our [producing an ebook page](/content/inklewriter/create-an-ebook "Producing an ebook"/index.html) and follow the instructions.

(The one thing you might need is a cover. Not a visual person? Perhaps you can find someone on the [forum](/content/forums "Forums"/index.html) who'll help!)

One note, though: unlike the rest of inklewriter, while this isn't an expensive service, it isn't free either. That's because it takes a little work on our side to do each and every story that comes our way. If the service proves really popular, we'll to try automate that and that might make it cheaper.

How it works

For those with some tech knowledge, this isn't using Amazon's Active Content, so that means it'll be available in every country where Amazon allows direct publishing - which is a lot of them!

(And if you want to know how it's done, well, imagine a near-infinite army of monkeys playing through all possible versions of your story from first page to last, with all the different branches, and then comparing notes. That's basically how it's done: only there really are quite a lot of monkeys involved.)

Sounds complicated

It is - but not for you. Your job is as simple and as difficult as ever: write a story that you're proud of. And don't worry about us: we've got some quite cunning software to help us out.

That's not to say there aren't some limitations. There are. Firstly, the system can't handle really, really big stories. How big is really big? We're not sure yet - even the longest, most fiddly story written to date works comfortably. But if you're planning an epic novel, you might hit difficulties.

Secondly, the system can't handle infinite loops - that is, stories where you can repeat the same paragraph, or sequence of paragraphs, forever. (That sends our monkeys into something of a tailspin.) But most stories avoid this kind of thing anyway, since it would get repetitive for a human reader too! (For tips on how to stop your loops being endless, take a look at our blog post about [using conditional logic](/content/archives/662 "Learning logic with Sherlock Holmes"/index.html).)

Want to know more? Check out the [inklewriter ebook page](/content/inklewriter/create-an-ebook "Producing an ebook"/index.html).

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