EDIT July 2020: I've just formatted my latest book, The Last Enforcer, for KDP and realized the advice in this post is out of date. Amazon has improved its systems to the point where you can load a Word document and get a perfectly formatted ebook. You still need to check thoroughly on the KDP Previewer and make the odd adjustment, but the process is much quicker and easier than the one below. Hurrah!
When I realized Ice Diaries' formatting was not changing size/fonts correctly on the Paperwhite Kindle, I did some research and reformatted all my books using Kia Zi Shiru's method you can find here. It worked for me. I'm writing my own version hoping it may help other indie writers. Be warned, this is an exacting fiddly process that took me a day the first time - the second was quicker. If you want to see what the end product looks like by this method, download Ice Diaries' sample, or better still buy it :o)
IMPORTANT NOTE: to demonstrate without fusing Blogger, I have changed pointy brackets for square, i. e. < for [, and > for ]. If you are going to format my way, I'd advise pasting this post into Word and changing the brackets so you can copy and paste the codes into your HTML document. Print it, and you can cross off each stage as you go.
- Make a new copy of your book in Word and call it 'TITLE for formatting'. Make sure the chapter headings are consistent, and the text is single-spaced. Remove any extraneous spaces at the ends of paragraphs by selecting the whole text, centre justify the selection and then left justify the selection. All the extra spaces will disappear. Do a Search and Replace replacing two spaces with one. Mark each pagebreak PB on its own line.
To format italics, go to Search and Replace. Leave the
search box blank, but in the Find/Replace dialogue box, under the Replace box,
is a More button. Click it, then click Format at the bottom of the box. From
the list that pops up select Font, and from that dialogue box, under Font
Style, select Italic. In the replace box put:
[I]^&[/I] (remember to change the brackets)
Click Replace All.
- Download Libre Office and Notepad++ which are free.
- Copy your Word document into Notepad++ in order to strip the formatting.
- Copy the text from Notepad++, open a new document in Libre Office and paste it in. Libre Office is good because unlike Word, it produces nice clean HTML. Close the Notepad++ file without saving, as you have finished with it now.
- Change the character set that LibreOffice uses for HTML, under Tools, Options, Load/Save, HTML compatibility. In the lower right there is Character set with a drop down menu next to it. Change this to Western Europe (ASCII/US).
- Go to File, Save As and save as TITLE html, as an HTML Document (Writer) (.html) from the drop down menu. When asked if you are sure, you are.
- At this stage, your whole text should show as Default in the top left box. If it doesn't, Select All and change it to Default.
- Go through the text making changes. Select the chapter headings and change them to Heading 1 in the box in the top left corner which otherwise says Default. I use H1 for the title on the title page, too. Don't bother centring at this point.
- Select each chapter title, if you have them, and change them to Heading 2.
- I change my name on the title page and Contents to bold.
- Put in bold and underlined in the text as required.
- Table of Contents: Amazon requires this at the front of the book. Highlight the heading Chapter 1 at the start of your first chapter, go to Insert and click on Bookmark. Type in Chapter 1 and OK. Do this for all your chapter headings.
- Go to your Table of Contents list. Click on Chapter 1. Go to Insert, Hyperlink. In the pop-up screen click on Document. Click on the circle with a dot on the second row, which opens a new pop-up. Click the + sign next to Bookmarks, and select Chapter 1. Click Apply, then Apply in the other window. Do this for all your chapters.
- Select the title CONTENTS and add a bookmark; call it TOC. Bookmark where you want the book to start; call it Start. This is for Kindle navigation.
- To add links to your website or other books, highlight, click Insert, Hyperlink, and click on Internet. Paste the URL of the site you want the link to go to, and click Apply.
- Click File, Preview in Web Browser to check your links work. Don't worry that it looks kind of plain.
- Open Notepad++, click File, Open and open your Libre document, 'TITLE html'.
- Add your title in line 5, between the tags. Delete lines 7 and 8.
- Look at the first of your [P] tags (Paragraph tags, in your normal text). Anything between the [P and the last ] can be cut; copy the whole tag and go to Search and Replace. Paste the whole tag in the top line, [P] in the bottom, and Replace all.
- Do the same for [H1] and [H2] tags, but leave the [A] tags well alone, as they are your link tags.
- Go to everything coloured green between [STYLE] and [/STYLE], delete what is there and paste the following - but remember to change the square brackets in the code to < and >:
[STYLE]
p { text-indent:1.2em;} { margin-top:0em; margin-bottom:0em; }
.center { text-indent:0em; text-align:center; }
.noindent {text-indent:0em;}
* {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
[/STYLE]
- Now to add the page breaks. Do Search and Replace all, replacing [P]PB[/P] with [mbp:pagebreak/]
- Centre lines you want centred: to do this, add class="center" between the first tag. So [P] becomes [P class="center"] (note there's a space after P) and [H1] becomes [H1 class="center"]. Do [H1] and [H2] all at once with Replace all. Woohoo!
- If, like me, you like the first line of a chapter or scene with no indent, then you need to change [P] to [P class="noindent"] where you want no indent. You will have to do each individually, I'm afraid.
- Save, and open Kindle Previewer on the KDP Upload page. Open your book and check every single page. Looks good? Then email the file to your own Kindle for a final read-through and check. If you find any problems, go back to the Notepad++ version and tweak.
- You're done. Pat yourself on the back and have a stiff drink.
