You pay little attention to formatting when you are in the process of writing. The fact that a book takes a long time to write creates most of the problems. The most important point about creating an ebook file in Word is maintaining consistency throughout the whole document. It is the ideal setting for an ebook file. In the image above, you can see that first line indent is used to create paragraphs with no line spacing before and after a line. So leave the thought of beautiful typography out of your thinking. I know many authors who get a little upset about not having a line space between paragraphs, but this is an ebook and not a book.īooks do not change size and shape, but ebooks do. The best method to achieve this is to eliminate paragraph and line breaks. Paragraph SettingsĪlso, reading an ebook on different screen sizes from a smartphone to a tablet needs fluid text. Just think about what happens when you read an ebook in landscape or portrait mode and how the text changes and flows. Paragraphs cause many problemsĪn ebook needs to be flexible with text, line length, and paragraphs. New Times Roman is a good choice for ebooks. You should only use Heading1 for your book title.īut make sure all of them are using the same font. You would use Normal for your body text and Heading 2 for your chapter titles. Stick to the basic ones such as Normal, Heading 1, and Heading 2. This help page from Microsoft gives a useful basic guide to using styles. It is the area that causes the most errors in a document. Then I can be sure that the ebook will be perfect on Kindle as well. I now have the habit of preparing a new book for Smashwords first and then publishing it to KDP. It is why you need to change your thinking from merely producing a Word document to producing an ebook file.Ī well-formatted ebook file will appear exactly the same in any ebook format, including Kindle, RTF, and epub files. When publishing with Smashwords, your ebook file needs to be suitable for nine different ebook formats, not just one. You can avoid all of these problems by formatting your ebook correctly before you start uploading and publishing. It is extremely annoying when fonts, line spacing, and paragraph formatting change, and page breaks create unwanted blank pages, or the table of contents is incorrect. I have read many Kindle ebooks that have suffered from this problem. The problem with this is that any poor formatting that is inherent in your document will affect the quality of your ebook. Kindle converts your file to its proprietary ebook format, and as long as your text fits on the screen, you will pass. Discussion thread about the new 0.For authors who are used to using Kindle Direct Publishing, it often comes as a surprise that the file you uploaded to KDP is unsuitable for other formats.Kindle Direct Publishing portal (for authors and small-medium publishers).The link to the discussion thread is below.īottom line: If you want to make the best possible Kindle eBook from your InDesign file, the new Kindle Publishing Guidelines for InDesign is a must-read.
Kindle direct publishing formatting software#
If you want to use those features, you’ll need to export to EPUB first, then use other free software from Amazon (KindleGen or Kindle Previewer, links below) and third parties (such as Calibre) to convert the stand-alone EPUB to MOBI.īut remember, the Export to Kindle plug-in is still in beta, and you are most welcome to chime in to the Kindle Direct Publishing forums with your thoughts about its feature set and usability. For CS5.5 users that means the Export to Kindle plug-in ignores the Articles panel and Object Export Options settings. InDesign’s own EPUB export can’t do that.Īlas, it’s the same plug-in for CS4 through CS5.5, so other than the special tricks added by the plug-in itself, it uses the lowest common denominator of CS4’s INDD > EPUB features for the heavy lifting. The guidelines even suggest that you use the Keeps setting of “Start on Next Page” in a paragraph style so you don’t have to enter the break character manually, and the plug-in will follow through. The plug-in is smart enough to convert InDesign page breaks (the special character you insert from the File > Insert Break Character menu) to chapter breaks in the Kindle book it exports. The plug-in appears in the File menu as Export for Kindle and also in the Books panel menu, if you want to export an entire InDesign book (INDB) to Kindle format. Technically, the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines for InDesign document is actually a how-to guide for using their free and recently updated Export to Kindle plug-in for InDesign, which works with CS4, CS5, and CS5.5. Of course it uses proper Paragraph Styles:Īnd even has a linked TOC (placed in the document, per their requirements) created from a TOC style: More after the jump! Continue reading below↓įree and Premium members see fewer ads! Sign up and log-in today.
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