Editio Self-Publishing discussion
Ebook Formatting
>
Kindle Formatting
date
newest »
newest »
Mine didn't have indentations although when a word doc it did. (I had it professionally formatted too).You can go in and reload it but I've decided not to bother this time. I think you can fix before you actually publish as well but I thought this was how kindle worked.
For more info go to the kdp questions on Amazon. Most are answered :)
Thanks. I was just alarmed when I saw it. It's hard work this formatting business! :)
These days I spend more time doing formatting and publicity work than actual writing. Hopefully, it will pay off in the end. Good luck.
Thanks for your help. I found a really helpful website that tells you how to format Kindle books. Seems I need to do them in html.Karen
Jeanette wrote: "These days I spend more time doing formatting and publicity work than actual writing. Hopefully, it will pay off in the end. Good luck."Hi Jeanette,
I'm in the same bind, and none of my publicity is paying off. It's miserable!
I hope you're getting some good results.
POW
Thanks for that Deb. I thought is was listed. I'll look into it. Appreciate your help.
FYI, it's called Cardsharp and it's getting a some nice reviews.
Cheers,
POW
Karen wrote: "Thanks for your help. I found a really helpful website that tells you how to format Kindle books. Seems I need to do them in html.Karen"
Karen, I did a roundup of resources for e-book authors recently, and there are a bunch of links to formatting info and free instruction.
Here's the link:
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/?p=13654
Hope that helps!
Joel's list (and his site in general) is very good and a place to start if you're beginning. I haven't much to add except to make the point that it's a good idea to keep your formatting as simple as you can. That's not as easy as it sounds because Microsoft Word is very good at adding complexity without you even realising. The Smashwords guide (which is on Joel's list) has a some good guidance on how to simplify Microsoft Word documents.
At this site you can download an app that will allow you to read Kindle files on your PC.http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html...
My documents are in Microsoft Word. I save them as HTML (filtered), then build the e-book with Mobipocket and I can read it right away in my PC using this APP. I have had not problems formatting my book.
Karen wrote: "I have just bought my first Kindle and have downloaded my own books to have a look at, and I'm horrified at the formatting. They were formatted fine when I uploaded them but now on Kindle they look..."Karen: if you uploaded your Word doc or your Word-to-HTML doc straight to Kindle, then their convertor, Kindlegen, adds an automatic first-line indent to every new paragraph. You can override that by using styles in your Word manuscript and then amending the code using Notepad (it's way easy, and you don't have to understand the code, you just have to follow directions). I cover this all in detail in my book on self-publishing, and provide all the recipes you need to achieve different effects.
Michelle
Author, Baby Jane, and
The Global Indie Author: How anyone can self-publish in the U.S. and worldwide markets
Rolando wrote: "At this site you can download an app that will allow you to read Kindle files on your PC.http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html......"
I use Smashwords.com and they have a reallllly simple step by step process. Then it's formated into at least 7-8 formats, and they distribute to several bookstores. Plus they'll give you a free ISBN !
I'm not an author, just an avid reader. I think ebook formatting can be quite tedious (but very important nevertheless especially for people like me), so if you guys need any help with formatting, I'm your girl~Example of my work:
BEFORE: http://bit.ly/yUgNsM
AFTER: http://bit.ly/AhnaQR (for Kindle & other e-readers that can read epub file)
I'll be working on formatting my memoir form the Kindle over the weekend. Wish me luck!
Sorry if this is a stupid question - I'm just finishing building all the elements of my book and haven't yet hit the formatting part (although it terrifies me). Do you have a choice of what font to use? Have you found certain fonts better for digital readers?
I've always used Times New Roman I really like it try size 12 or 14.
This is all changing rapidly with KF8, Amazon's new format for the Fire. The word is that all Kindles (including the apps for Mac, PC, and iPad) will be upgraded to KF8 soon. This allows you a great deal of layout control. The best tool for doing that is InDesign CS6 (once Amazon releases the free plug-in for CS6). However, even with CS5.5, I'm getting a lot of formatting control and I can embed any fonts I have the license to use—flawlessly.
Tellulah wrote: "Sorry if this is a stupid question - I'm just finishing building all the elements of my book and haven't yet hit the formatting part (although it terrifies me). Do you have a choice of what font ..."
Kindle gives you no choices unless you are formatting for the KindleFire (KF8). If you want to choose the fonts, you probably need much better formatting than Word allows. If you have an all text book, just keep it simple and let Kindle choose the font. AFAIK Smashwords is still recommending Garamond (but it doesn't matter unless you are embedding fonts to use with the Kindle Fire).
You can always check the formatting of your book before publication even if you don't have an e-reader. Download this App from Amazon which is safe and free. It will allow you to read e-books in your computer.http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html...
Karen wrote: "Seems I need to do them in html. Karen"
Maybe you already caught this but you don't need to "do them in html." You can work in Word and then save as 'filtered web page' Format your hard page breaks in the html format as well as setting up your internal chapter links.
The only issue I have run across seems to be fairly common in kindle format. On occasion I will get an odd symbol, sometimes a rectangle or an ampersend or a rectangle with a question mark in it. Someone explained to me how to correct it using htmal encoding. I decided they were rare, I couldn't search for them, and the work done to fix something that turned up every hundred pages wasn't worth the effort.
Word [Office] has its own unique way of working with symbols and special characters. This is yet another reason to import your Word doc to InDesign. You can clean these things up easily and export your Kindle book directly from InDesign 4-5.5 using the free plug-in from Amazon. But you really need 5.5 or CS6.For text-only books, Word is a possibility, but you need to wean yourself as soon as possible.
David, if that was in response to my post above yours, I don't have any symbols or special characters. They just appear where an apostrophe should be or between words. I see this a lot in some of the public domain books available. Works of Mark Twain comes to mind.
Not a big thing beyond the submission not being perfect. On my own stuff, I find these anomalies maybe one per hundred pages. as I said, not worth fooling with. Other than the odd symbol appearing, I go Word, mobi, kindle without a hitch. Suppose if I had lots of internal pics and wrapping, might be different issues. I'll stay away from recipe books.
I know which ones you are talking about. It is usually curly quotes, either single or double, and Word uses a character mapping that ensures that everything else changes it to weird things. I just finished a Kindle book that was full of them.
Tellulah wrote: "Sorry if this is a stupid question - I'm just finishing building all the elements of my book and haven't yet hit the formatting part (although it terrifies me). Do you have a choice of what font ..."
Telluah: Although only the Kindle Fire will display embedded fonts, you are still limited to "websafe" fonts as other fonts (and thus their characters) may not be recognized by the ereader. Use only: Arial (Regular only, not Black), Courier New, Georgia, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana. Do not use any other fonts and especially do not use Dingbats, Wingdings, or Webdings. Do not use any font larger than 18 points or smaller than 10 points.
Also, only certain text effects are recognized: italics, bold, underline, superscript, subscript, and strike-through. All other text effects cannot be read and will be converted to regular text. This includes text effects like all caps and small caps.
Lastly, if you use symbols they must belong to these same websafe font families and must be a recognized subset. What is a font subset? In Word, if you select Insert > Symbol, in the box that appears you will see on the left a field naming the font and on the right a field titled “Subset.” Most of the common fonts—such as Times New Roman, for example—have the subsets Basic Latin, Latin-1, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, IPA Extensions, and so on. Basic Latin and Latin-1 will be recognized by Kindle but not the other subsets (in some fonts certain symbols normally found in Latin-1 are found under the subset General Punctuation and are recognized).
For a list of characters accepted by Kindle, Amazon suggests referring to the Wikipedia page on Latin-1/ISO-8859-1.
David wrote: "I know which ones you are talking about. It is usually curly quotes, either single or double, and Word uses a character mapping that ensures that everything else changes it to weird things. I just ..."The text of your manuscript is governed by a coding language. The default language of English in Word for PC is Windows-1252, also known as Western European (Windows). Most Mac computers by default use either Western (MacRoman) or Western European (Mac). When you use a special character, a curly quote for example, Windows codes it one way and Mac another; this is why you will often see in an email sent from a Mac computer to a PC computer, or vice versa, curly quotes replaced by a question mark or some other incorrect character.
For Kindle books, Amazon requires Windows-1252; both Windows and Mac users therefore need to use Western European (Windows) encoding. In Word 2003: Tools > Options > General tab > Web Options > Encoding tab > “Save this document as” > select “Western European (Windows).” In Word 2007+: Word icon > Word Options > Advanced > General > Web Options > Encoding tab > “Save this document as” > select “Western European (Windows).” In Mac: Word icon > Preferences > General > Web Options > Encoding tab > “Save this document as” > select “Western European (Windows).”
Michelle
To Kindle in Ten Steps: The Easy Way to Format, Create and Self-Publish an eBook to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.
Actually it's worse than that. Word gives real strange conversions when you drop it into a pro layout app like InDesign. I'm real thankful for a powerful find & change.
Trying to resolve some issues and it seems I create others. Been having some e-mail exchange with KDP staff and making some changes.My big gripe was my hyphens were being published as rectangles with question marks in them. This is a fairly common complaint and is inherent in the mobi conversion. I have taken the mobi out of the equation and solved that issue.
However, I now have first line indents that are about half the kindle screen. Its not terrible but its not the 1/2" first line indent I set up in Word.
When I converted word to HTML and uploaded, I lost the first line indents but fixed the hyphen issue. I had Caliber on my computer but started working in it and decided I didn't want to learn new software for the minimal advantage in publishing formats. I understand it has its own problems with file corruptions.
Hi David,I've been thinking about getting InDesign and you seem the resident expert :-) I've got a question: back last year, when Amazon started rolling out KF8 to Kindle Touch and Kindle 4, it turned out there was a bug in the InDesign Kindle plug-in that caused the 'tiny font' problem. Even Amazon's own documentation for their plug-in was barely readable. Do you know if that's been fixed yet? Thanks.
Tellulah wrote: Do you have a choice of what font ..."
I'm afraid you only get to choose the font if you get into the html and edit some of your styles. Amazon changes the list of fonts they use and different types of Kindle devices might have different fonts available. Here's a list of Kindle Fire fonts http://www.paulsalvette.com/2012/06/e...
If you get into the html, you set the font choices with the font-family setting, something like:
h1
{
text-indent: 0;
text-align: center;
margin: 2.4em 0 1.5em 0;
font-family: Caecilia, Georgia, serif;
font-size: 2.4em;
font-weight: bold;
line-height:200%;}
In this example, I've said: "Give me the Caecilia font. If you can't do that, give me Georgia. If you can't do that, give me any old serif font."
Here's the response I got from Amazon regarding the first line indents:"By default, text on Kindle is displayed with full justified alignment and automatic hyphenation. The first line of each paragraph is automatically indented. Please note that the reader can adjust the alignment dynamically on a Kindle reader, Kindle for mobile devices, and Kindle for PC/Mac.
In general we recommend letting readers choose the alignment they prefer, but if you feel changing the alignment will better suit your content, please visit the following link to learn more:
http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing...
I hope this helps. Thanks for using Amazon KDP."
Try setting up your MS in Word using smashwords style guide and then preview it before pub with Adobe Digital Editions. That MS will upload to Kindle.I found a large numeral four in the middle of nowhere and it didn't show up in my MS. But I fiddled with the spacing and made it go away.
Ken wrote: "Here's the response I got from Amazon regarding the first line indents:..."
Ken, the 0.5" will probably be converted into another unit of measure by the tool Amazon uses to convert Word files to Kindle, so don't treat that size literally. 0.5" sounds large. I would try 0.25"
Not sure whether this is also part of your problem, but a lot of people get confused when lines that are flush left in Microsoft Word are indented on the Kindle. If you want the first line of a new chapter to not be indented, and html is not your thing, then I've seen books that don't look too bad that kludge this by setting the first line indent to a very small value, say 0.1". So, set your 'Normal' style to first line indent 0.1" and your body style to first-line indent 0.25". The reason you need to do this is because Microsoft Word doesn't allow you to save a style that says 'set first line indent to zero'. It looks as if it does from the Word paragraph style dialog, but that's not what gets saved.
You won't find reference to this first-line indent problem in the Smashwords guide, because the Smashwords system (they call it the Meatgrinder) uses Caliber to do its conversion, and Caliber creates code (CSS styles) to record its paragraph indentation, and the Kindle devices understand and respect this CSS code.
At this point I've messed with the sample chapters and downloaded them. The kindle previewer shows indents at about half the line. The downloaded has no first line indent. I'm not certain I am getting the latest and greatest because it doesn't show as 'updated' on manage your kindle. This all started when I tried to fix the hyphen problem.The other volumes that I haven't messed with have perfect alignment with a small first line indent.
I'm having a promo on Sun for the intro chapters. As a favor, perhaps someone with prime could borrow the first four chapters and let me know if it looks OK. Or, buy it for a buck and send me a private message and I'll reimburse you. Not asking for a proofread but would like to know if the general appearance is acceptable and if the hyphen in 'pre-dawn' at the beginning of Chapter 3 is there (its not on my version).
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055WXMEO
Thanks.
Ken wrote: "At this point I've messed with the sample chapters and downloaded them. The kindle previewer shows indents at about half the line. The downloaded has no first line indent. I'm not certain I am g..."Ken, I had a quick look at the sample. It looked okay on my Kindle Touch except the first-line indents vary considerably in the distance of indent. If you wanted to send the first chapter or so of your Word document to editors@greyhartpress.com then I could possibly spot what's not right.
Tim
Tim wrote: "Ken wrote: "At this point I've messed with the sample chapters and downloaded them. The kindle previewer shows indents at about half the line. The downloaded has no first line indent. I'm not ce..."Thanks, just got home and will send you a PM.
My wife wrote a book in Russian language. I scanned her book and saved it as a PDF file. I published it on Scribd with no problems. I was also able to publish it on Kindle from the PDF but it appears to be rotated 90 degrees and the pages are divided into two pages each. I asked Kindle for help but they just say that they do not support e-books in Russian even though their site contains many e-books in Russian language. They suggested I convert the PDF to HTML. I tried this but it turned the book into gibberish.Can anyone help me rotate the book 90 degrees on Kindle and make the pages appear on one page instead of two?
The book can be seen now on Kindle as A Strange Wind in San Francisco by Flora McDonald.
Thanks!
There are several ways to format for Kindle. For most of my clients, I can create a validated Kindle format book from my design software, InDesign. That seems to be the easiest and least bug free way to publish ebook layouts. The problem is that kindle only supports a handful of fonts and formatting parameters, so it tries to convert ones that are foreign to its software. One of the best free services for ebook conversion is Smashwords.com. Although you will have to conform to its style guide for formatting a Word doc, the results are 100 percent readable and compatible with Kindle and other e readers. What's more, they distribute you ebook to Amazon, B&N, and other ebook retailers.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about ebook formatting. My email is submission@launchpad-press.com
Sincerely,
Thomas
If anyone is still really "stuck" with the formatting of their manuscripts, I can fix the formatting problems and make your book look great on an e-reader and in print. I currently format for KDP, CreateSpace, Smashwords, and Lulu. You can visit my website here or email me at christine@christinericepublishingservices.com
I am quite a technophobe. I am helping a friend to get his book published to Kindle. I downloaded the word document onto calibre, and it was then converted to mobi and epub and pdf. The epub will not upload to Smashwords. It comes up with errors which are way above my techinical head to fix.
The Kindle version has updated to Amazon but for some reason I cannot get rid of page numbers and also there are pages where there are 4 words to a page for a few paragraphs and then back to normal.
What am I doing wrong? Where do I start? It can't cost me any money as the author has no further funds.
Any suggestions?
I ended up using formatting Word per the Smashwords Style Guide and that resolved all issues. Now I write in the template I created. Once you use the suggested template most issues disappear.The only thing it didn't do was center the symbols I use at the end of a scene. I had to do a find and replace for these. I did not use Smashwords for publication as once you use their Meat Grinder converter the Smashwords formatted document is for use on Smashwords only.
Ken wrote: "I ended up using formatting Word per the Smashwords Style Guide and that resolved all issues. Now I write in the template I created. Once you use the suggested template most issues disappear.Th..."
Thank you Ken. I'll try and find their Smashwords Style guide and read that. I found I could convert it for Smashwords, but trying to put it as an e-pub was so confusing to someone who's not technically minded, as was Sigil. I did use Calibre to convert it to e-pub but Smashwords didn't like that either.
It's mainly the Amazon copy I'm concerned about as it's uploaded but the quality isn't very good with all the spacing, despite calibre saying it's a suitable mobi file.
The Style Guide can be found here. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52
Once you create a template using the guidelines, it will work with Amazon, Kobo, B&N, iTunes, etc. It will work for a POD as well but you need to do some margin magic.
Read the FAQs on Smashwords about their Meat Grinder tool. The info might be in the style guide. Here's a handy tip in Word: When you do a find and replace, click on the 'more' tab and take a peek at what you can do under the format and special tabs. Great for making blanket format changes.
Is this a common occurance and how do I fix it?
Thanks