More in this series: Part 1, Part 2

In Part 2, I described my basic workflow for publication to KDP. Step 1 of that workflow was “tweak formatting of Word doc.” In this installment I’m going to add some details regarding what tweaks actually help.

I should have written this installment first, as I fear I’ve forgotten some of the hoops I jumped through. Here are the ones I remember.

1) Everything (as in, each and every character in your Word doc) should be formatted using Styles. If you don’t know what that means, or you need to sharpen up your knowledge of how to use Styles, do so, but don’t try to fake this step.

2) The only exceptions to (1) should be at the individual character or word level, such as making a word bold in a paragraph. Keep these exceptions to a minimum.

3) Don’t ever use tabs, multiple spaces, multiple carriage returns or new lines, or any other means of manipulating the white space. All of that information should be in the styles. As an example, after a chapter header or some other type of non-normal paragraph, I used a style called NormalGap to add the extra white space. NormalGap was identical to NormalBase, the style I used for 99% of my text, except that it included 12pt spacing before it, thus following rule (1) and (3).

4) Base all your styles on the default Normal style. I’m not sure this is totally required, but I had significant problems with my paragraph indents on the first sentence until I started following this rule.

5) Don’t actually use the default Normal style. Create an identical style with a different name. Mine was NormalBase. No joke. This rule proved critical to getting a predictable output from Work -> Calibre -> KDP.

6) Sizing images is trial and error. The little curly images I used under each chapter header had to be much larger in Word than they appeared on the Kindle.

7) Add a chapter break before each new chapter. Do so via the paragraph settings in the Style, not as an inserted page break.

8) Minimize special fonts, margins, and other exceptions. Again, any such exceptions should be defined as a style based on the Normal style (or a style based on the Normal style). Don’t center a paragraph or change the margins via text formatting. Am I sounding repetitious?

9) Table of Contents get built as a separate file in the EPUB standard. MOBI puts it in the main book document. In part two of this series, I said “convert to MOBI (using some special settings)”. Some of those special settings were to point to the style I used for Chapter headers so Calibre could build an external TOC. However, you may still want a TOC in your book. Calibre gives an option to insert one at the very beginning or very end. I wanted mine right before chapter 1 but after the title page and dedication, so I had to build my own. Based on what I read elsewhere, I didn’t let Word build it for me. Instead, I added a bookmark at each chapter header and then add cross reference links to those chapters. This approach will not yield working chapter skips on the Kindle. The Calibre conversion with pointers to the Chapter style will create those skips. FYI.

10) No headers or footers. Default margins. No page numbers anywhere, just links (e.g. for the TOC). Etc.

More in this series: Part 1

In part 1, I listed my formatting goals, which were determined by a painful process of trial and error. Here’s a few of the problems I encountered along the way.

1) The cover image treated as a normal interior picture and given margins
2) More than one cover
3) Paragraph spacing normalized in the eBook (i.e. larger spaces between paragraphs ignored)
4) Next / Previous Chapter not working
5) Images sized weirdly (the only image I used was a little squiggle after each chapter header, and it was a pain)
6) Clickable table of contents not linked properly (actually, I headed this one off at the pass based on what I read from others’ experiences)
7) Page breaks at new chapters
8) Empty pages

There were more, but that gives an idea of what we are trying to overcome with our formatting goals. So, moving right along, let’s list out the tools of the (eBook) trade:

1) Microsoft Word

2) Calibre

That’s about it, unless you want to count the web browser used to upload files to KDP and Pubit! You’ve probably heard of Microsoft Word. Calibre is a free, open source ebook manager, and it happens to do a better job of creating MOBI files than any other tool I found. MOBI is the file type used by Kindles. When you upload your ebook to KDP and you want to know for sure how it is going to display, your best option is to do all the converting ahead of time and upload a MOBI file. Calibre will also convert your files to EPUB for Pubit! publication to Nook.

Here was my work flow to publish to Amazon’s KDP (a nearly identical workflow can be used with Pubit! and the Nook)

1) tweak formatting of Word doc.

2) save word doc as filtered HTML

3) import HTML into Calibre

4) convert to MOBI (using some special settings)

5) tell Calibre to email the MOBI file to my Kindle

6) evaluate book on Kindle

7) repeat 1 – 6 as needed

8) upload finished MOBI to Amazon and publish

In the next installment in the series, we’ll discuss the specifics of formatting a Word document for ebook publication.

More in this series: Part 2

After I wrote The Lodestone, I started working on three things:

1) Proofing / editing

2) the cover

3) formatting for Kindle

I take that back. First I started soliciting agents. Then I moved on to the three items above. Item one was easy (for me). My wonderful mom has served as a professional proof reader for a major publisher, and she volunteered to help me out. Item two (the cover) is for another post.

On to item three: formatting my manuscript for Kindle Direct Publishing (and Pubit! for the Nook, and ultimately print publication with Createspace). This is going to take more than one post, but you probably already knew that given the title of the post.

In this first post I’d like to discuss the formatting goals that I had. Before I list them, however, let me make one thing clear. There is a lot of input out there on how to format ebooks. Go ahead and look around. Do a few searches online. I’m confident you’ll agree with me. Strangely, though, I had a bear of a time getting the formatting to work. The ecosystem is still in its infancy, and the various tools leave much to be desired.

My formatting goals were:

• A cover image that didn’t have unnecessary margins but went edge to edge on the screen.
• An indent at the start of paragraphs.
• Consistent, predictable line spacing for chapter titles and paragraph breaks that needed a gap (e.g. when the scene was changing mid-chapter).
• A linked table of contents in the body of the book prior to chapter 1
• Navigation links that worked (e.g. the Kindle’s “Go to…” with the options of Cover, Beginning, TOC).
• A well-sized chapter image (just a little squiggle underneath the “Chapter 1″).
• Page breaks that worked before the title page, dedication, TOC, each chapter, etc.
• Secondary text formatting that was preserved (in my case, this was a second font used for emails a character was reading)
• Chapter breaks that were navigable (so you can go forward a page at a time or a chapter at a time on the Kindle)

I ultimately achieved all of these goals with one exception. To get the navigable chapters, I lost the “Go to… Beginning” link. Why I had to make this trade-off… I’m still a little mystified, but when it was all said and done my chapters were navigable but the Beginning link points to the Title page instead of Chapter 1.

What I’m skipping is the incredible effort it took to figure out that these were the problems I had to solve. It was very hard to find a comprehensive list of what I was even trying to achieve as I formatted the book.

In future installments, I’ll discuss the tools I used and some of the hoops I jumped through to get it to all come together.