Formatting for Kindle

lvcabbie,

Thanks for the link. I left a comment at your blog.

Nancy

This Kindle Formatting thing is a bit weird.

I uploaded my book and basically trusted that Amazon would be able to properly translate between a Word doc and Kindle format and it worked fine. The version on my iPad looks great. A+.

But then I revised it and uploaded the revision and there was a "preview" pane which, when brought up, showed the formatting as being all jacked up.

So I spent about an hour working in Word with paragraph breaks and carriage returns until the preview pane on Amazon showed something readable, at which point I called it good.

But now apparently the formatting is actually jacked up. So what I've learned is; don't trust that preview pane.

Matthew Colville said:

. . . I uploaded my book and basically trusted that Amazon would be able to properly translate between a Word doc and Kindle format. . ..

Click to expand...

This seems to work (and is recommended by Amazon): Format the book right in Word (which of course assumes that one knows how to do that . . .) without headers, footers, or anything weird. Page breaks are OK. Not sure about section breaks. Save in Word as an HTML file. Print preview that and then fix any errors you see (showing all formatting marks when fixing will probably help). Re-save as HTML after the fixes. Upload THAT file (the HTML, not the .doc) to Kindle. It is a little more complicated if there are illustrations, and I have not experimented with that.

Amazon offers a (free, I think) guide on Kindle formatting, AS a Kindle download.

--Ken

lvcabbie said:

Yeah, it does offer a formatting guide - if you're a professional printer!!!. . . .

Click to expand...

You just have to know how to use Word right. I was surprised at how easy it was to make a Kindle-friendly file from a well-formatted Word file (the sort I'd been turning into PDFs for POD printing). But then, I've been setting up books in Word for years. Most folks have no clue about paragraph and heading styles and the stuff not to do (such as indenting paragraphs with a tab character). BTW, I turned out files for Kindle before even looking at a guide to formatting for the Kindle. It is that easy.

--Ken