My Journey in Writing, Ranting, and Woodworking

Publishing is an interesting endeavor.  I’ve written before, on this very blog, that it takes me about one hour to prepare my books for Kindle or Nook.  This evening I learned that a big part of the reason it is so easy for me, is because I know what sort of problems to avoid for Kindle.

About 3 hours ago I saw a tweet from a friend who had just put her book up on Kindle.  We indie authors need to stick together, so I popped over and bought a copy. Paranormal romance isn’t really the genre that I prefer, but I still wanted to give it a read.

It was unreadable.

Not that it was poorly written, but the formatting was terrible.  When I say terrible, I am using the term in a decidedly British understated fashion.  In fact, there has yet to be a word invented that could describe the jumbled mess that was her book.  If I compared it to Hurricane Katrina, then I’d say that it was messier than the aftermath of that horrible disaster.

It wasn’t that my friend was sloppy, either.  She had gone to great lengths to make her document look polished and tidy.  Sadly, this is where the problem lies for most first time Kindle publishers.

There is an acronym called “WYSIWYG”, or What You See Is What You Get.  Almost everything we use on computers is WYSIWYG and the computer using public expects things to work that way.  Kindle publishing DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

The reason for this is that the reader is a very flexible device.  It lets the user choose their font and, in the case of the ipad Kindle reader app, choose to read it vertically or horizontally.  This means that the set-up of the file is much different than one would think.

1. Don’t use spaces or extra “carriage returns” (Note:  “Carriage return” is the term one used when hitting the little arm on a manual typewriter.)  In this case, it means the “enter” or “return” button on your keyboard.  If you do use extra returns you will have huge gaps between paragraphs.
2. Learn where the “Paragraph Marks” button is on MS Word.  It looks like a Pi sign.  It is usually in the section with the “center, left or right, align” buttons.  When you turn this on, you will see all the spots where there is a “return”.
3. At the moment when you are ready to start formatting for Kindle, do something that is called the “Nuclear Option”.  (Note:  I didn’t coin the phrase “Nuclear Option”, but I like it.)

Step 1:  Use <ctrl> A to highlight your whole manuscript.

Step 2:  Open Notepad.  All PCs come with Notepad. It will be under Accessories.

Step 3:  Paste the entire document into Notepad.

Step 4:  Notepad eliminates all the extra, hidden formatting.  What you should see is one line per paragraph.  An easy way to quickly look for formatting errors is to peak at the first character of each line.  It will be either a (“) or a capital letter.  This makes sense because all paragraphs start with a new sentence, so the first letter will be capitalized.  Or one will be writing dialogue, which may star with a  (“).

Step 5:  Copy and Paste the document back into MS Word.

Step 6:  Don’t start adding in spaces and stuff to make it look pretty!!!

Step 7:  Upload it to Kindle DTP and see how it looks.

There are other things one can do, too.  But they are beyond the scope of this blahg piece.  One can have a table of contents , cover art, and photos, but again, I’m not covering that stuff.

The moral of the story is this.  When one is writing their “Great American Novel”, don’t worry about formatting.  Write it in block paragraphs, single spaced, and then go through those steps.

If you do, you’ll only need to spend time worrying about the Table of Contents and such.  It should take less than an hour.  Conversely, if you don’t, it will take a long time to clean up.  I spent close to three hours getting my friend’s document ready, because she didn’t know about all the pitfalls of trying to make it look nice in MS Word.

One last bit of advice. If your take away from this is that MS Word is the problem, then you are missing the point.  If you try to use another program, well then, you’re screwed.  It will take you dozens of hours to make it work and you will likely end up going on a tri-stake killing spree.  Use Word, use returns sparingly and avoid the temptation to make it look pretty in Word.

Good luck my writing friends.