How to Make a Preview of Your Book Using Calibre

On Prolific Works, you can choose to upload your whole book, or just a portion. The latter option is recommended for authors whose books are offered on Kindle Unlimited (KU) or published through Amazon KDP Select (Kindle Direct Publishing). As per Amazon's Terms and Conditions, if your book is on their platform through either of these programs, you are restricted from giving away your full book for sale or for free elsewhere. If you would still like to promote your book to readers through Prolific Works, Amazon allows authors to give away previews, which can be up 10% of a full manuscript. This could mean offering the first few chapters in your book as a teaser for readers!

Creating Your Preview

You will need an epub file to upload your book to Prolific Works. If you do not have an epub file of your book, see how to convert your book into an epub file here.

Once you have the epub, you can follow these steps to create a preview of your book from a full manuscript:

Open or download the free ebook manager application, Calibre, here.
Upload your book into Calibre if you have not already done so by finding the file on your computer, and simply dragging and dropping it into the application. The book should appear in your Calibre Library.
Control click or right click on your book to bring up the options drop-down, and select "Edit Book".
You will be redirected to ebook-edit. Before getting started with editing your book, you'll want to create a copy of your full book so that it doesn't get lost through editing. To do so, simply click "File" and click "Save a Copy". You'll be prompted to name the copy and choose where to save it to on your computer. Save the copy as "Title Full" so that you won't confuse it with your preview later on.
Once you've saved a copy of your full manuscript, you can go back to editing. Within the application ebook-edit, you'll see the contents of your book listed on the left hand side under "Text".
Next, select the sections that you would not like to include in the preview. Note: If you hold down the "shift" key, you can select a chunk of chapters (for example Chapter 6 - 17) by selecting the first and last chapters of the section you'd like to delete.
Next, you'll need to control click or right click to bring up the editing menu, and select "Delete the selected files".
An alternative way to create a preview is to select the chapters that you want to include, an export them as a separate file. You'd want to select "Export all selected files".
Make sure to save your changes by clicking on the save button at the top left.
Next, return to your Calibre Library and edit the title of your book by double clicking on the existing title. Label the file as a preview so that you can easily find it in the future.
To export your book, you can either click and hold on the selected book and drag it over to your desktop, or save it by clicking "Save to Disk" at the top of the screen.