This is ditzy, especially if your book is long, and it’s not necessary. If you want to decorate opening lines, set the first few words in all caps ( not small caps!), and set the first line of a first paragraph under a heading or subheading flush left. Converting an ordinary Word file with drop caps will create a screw-up. Although it’s possible to do so, you need to know coding to make it work. Name the Style “Italic.” (Or bold face or small caps or whatever.)ĭo not try to insert drop caps. If you want to create a style for italic, for example, simply click on the i icon for italic. In the pane that appears, under “Formatting” you’ll be able to choose whatever you like. Then, in Format > Style > New, click the down arrow in the “Format” box. Be sure it’s set for the font and size you’ve chosen. Format all italic, bold face, and small caps using “Styles.” Styles for this purpose come with a commercial template if you’re using a plain ordinary Word document, you may have to create a new style. You can highlight a whole series of paragraphs at once, or you can format one paragraph and use the formatting brush icon to spread the selected format around to other paragraphs. Once in there, explore around: you’ll find commands to set the font color and size and the paragraph formatting.įormat the paragraphs as well as the heads and subheads using “Styles.” If you’re not using a template, use the style titled “Normal.” To format a paragraph, highlight it and go to Format > Style > Normal. You can either manually change the color to black, or you can reset the Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles with Format > Styles > Modify. Word, which is extremely rigid, sets these things in blue type. Use Word’s “Styles” to format your MS for Amazon. Format the chapter headings (known as “level 1 heads”) as Heading 1 and any subheads under that (known as “level 2 heads”) as Heading 2. Step 3:Format ALL content using Word’s “styles” function. For best results, select one that switch-hits between print and e-book formatting. I personally like Joel Friedlander’s Word templates from Book Design Templates, because they’re extremely easy to use and they come with the TofC field built in. Step 2: Insert a table of contents field, if you know how. Do not insert a running header with page numbers plus your name or the book title or the chapter title, because these will not appear in the Kindle version. Similarly, e-books do not have running headers and footers. However, for your purposes, it doesn’t matter because your font formatting will go away in Kindle, so…use the plainest standard font formatting as your default. I have my Word set to default to Times New Roman 12 points, no space before or after paragraphs, because I dislike Word’s current default font and hate having air around my grafs. The font does not matter, because Kindle readers can choose whatever font and size they wish and Amazon will arrogate your copy unto itself and use a standard font for the Kindle production. In this process, loss of ten or fifteen minutes of work will be intensely frustrating, because it’s mind-numbing work and because you can get a fair amount done in that period and you will not feel happy about having to do it all over again. Better to lose three or four minutes’ worth of work than ten minutes’ worth. Word is squirrelly and fully capable of crashing at random (as you probably know by now…). Step 1:Set your program to save every five minutes. Here’s how, assuming you’re working in Word… I’m not going to go into the horrors here, but trust me: you do not want to try to get even one image or other graphic into a Kindle book from Word on your own.īut if what you have is a novel, or a piece of nonfiction that contains nothing but plain, unadorned narrative, you can get that up on Kindle as easily as the next guy. ANY kind: that means tables, graphs, charts, maps, photographs, drawings… anything that is not plain narrative with one (count it, 1) level of subhead below the chapter heading level. You should hire a professional ebook formatter who knows HTML and CSS like a native language when your book contains any kind of graphics. The answers are “yes and no.” That makes sense, because the answer is “yes and no.”įirst, let’s look at the “When NOT to” embark on a DIY ebook formatting expedition. One of the members asked if it’s very difficult to format your own book in Word and upload it from Word to Kindle. An interesting conversation is going on at my favorite Facebook group of nonfiction scribblers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |