Formatting for paperbacks and Kindle

Are you working in Word?

To make sure I understand, you have each new paragraph beginning flush left, no indent. Then there are two paragraph returns.

To fix it:

1. Select all of the text.
2. In the Paragraph options box... In the Indentations section... Select "First line" from the Special drop down menu... and put .5" in the box under By. Then click OK.
3. With the text still selected, bring up the "Replace" box.
4. Replace ^p^p with ^p

That should indent the beginning of each paragraph by half an inch and get rid of the extra line between paragraphs.

If you can get it, I find the best thing to use is an html editor such as Dreamweaver or Cutehtml(freeware). You can see exactly what the finished product will look like and then you export it as an html file and load it into a program such as mobipocket creator. Mobipocket will export it as a prc(proprietary kindle file format) file and you can upload that file to the kindle site.

Hope that helps.

rainsmom said:

To fix it:
1. Select all of the text.
2. In the Paragraph options box... In the Indentations section... Select "First line" from the Special drop down menu... and put .5" in the box under By. Then click OK.
3. With the text still selected, bring up the "Replace" box.
4. Replace ^p^p with ^p
That should indent the beginning of each paragraph by half an inch and get rid of the extra line between paragraphs.

Click to expand...

To add to this excellent reply, I'd emphasize learning and using the /format /paragraph feature of word. Using tab indents ^t really messes with some file converters. In Smashwords, a single tab character can set off a nuclear chain reaction. Even the converter used by lulu.com will occasionally gag on a tab character. I couldn't get one manuscript to compile until i'd tracked down the single tab character hiding between two paragraphs.

After following Rainsmom's recipe above, it helps to scan every page, taking one's time. Some places, there may be extra spaces, etc, that cause the formatting to go strange. So quickly check that nothing has gone wrong.

We also have an entire sub-forum here on self publishing. You should be able to find a ton of info there.

KDP (Kindle) publishing automatically defaults to 0.5 paragraph indents if you don't specify anything else. I find this to be too big on a Kindle reader, so I change mine to 0.3.

The problem you're going to have is that if you used nornal carriage returns for your spacing (used "Enter" in "Normal" mode in Word), then your formatting will come out a mess. You have to use "Space After" in the "Format" tab to set up any blank spaces in your document. It's easiest to set up a "Style" for this, and then you can use "Enter" for a new paragraph. You can also select all the text and apply the style. However, for chapter titles or other matter involving spaces, you will have to do those separately. the same is true for scene breaks within a chapter.

At the end of each chapter you also have to insert a page break to start the next chapter or Kindle will smash everything together.

I would visit the "Formatting" forum of the KDP forums for further advice.

Brian January
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