Formatting for the Kindle?

abctriplets

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I've spent the past few days formatting my book for the kindle. Had to relearn a bunch of html, and have realized that it would have been much easier had my book not contained so much poetry.

Guido Henkel's guide has been a ton of help. (http://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-pride-in-your-ebook-formatting/)

I took my Word document, used Word2CleanHTML, and then have been tinkering with the code in KompoZer, before using Calibre to convert it into a mobi file. I've been able to figure out most of the formatting issues I've run across, but am stumped with 2 problems:

1) Looking at the document on the kindle, my cover image doesn't work right. The top fifth is repeated, and the bottom fifth is missing. The original image is 500x814, and I have it attached via calibre's metadata page.

2) The left margin is larger than the right for my paragraphs. Currently my default paragraph code is
p
{
text-indent: 1.2em;
margin-bottom: 0.2em;
}

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks!
 

abctriplets

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Well, I thought the cover looked like crap, so I redesigned it. For some reason the new image works. Strange thing about formatting these e-books - you tinker enough to get it right, and you never quite know what you did...
 

dgaughran

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Thanks for this abctriplets - I'll be formatting my first two shorts when I get them back from my editor on Monday or Tuesday, so I have bookmarked this. Luckily I know a little HTML and have used JEdit before (and used to have a job cleaning styles out of word docs and styling them cleanly), so I am hoping it shouldn't be too bad. It's only a 4,000 word doc, so good one to practice on anyway.