The key to saving yourself a whole lot of time is to learn a bit about formatting for Kindle before you start to write. Sure, you can go back and change the formatting but it can take hours, and you want to concentrate on writing the novel or short story, and not on reformatting. These tips apply if you have Word (and perhaps others like Open Office but I don't know that for sure) and you can save the first of your two versions in doc or docx. More about that other version later.
Epublishing came to be extremely popular in the last few years. It's quite a bit different to print publishing, as most of us know. With Kindle's direct to the Kindle/Amazon site, anyone can publish their own books in almost an instant. What a way to read aspiring new authors as well as seasoned vets! Printed books are always popular, and now anyone can add the electronic versions as well. This will increase sales, and give encouragement to your writing efforts. Pick a genre for your novel, such as a thriller or romance, and setting -- Ancient Egypt, for instance.
Formats for Epublishing depend a lot on which platform you are publishing on, so I can tell you a little about Kindle only, at the moment. When you publish on Kindle you can also tell customers on your website how to download an app for their iPad. This enables the stunning graphics which iPad possesses, to really highlight your Kindle-published book. This iPad Kindle app is free from the app store.
The nitty-gritty:
• Using Word, and saving in doc or docx, set your margins to a half inch and page size to 5" by 7". This will give you the approximate visual look of an ebook.
• Do not put any kind of header or footer or page numbers in there. These are useless for ebooks as the customer can resize the page as they wish.
• You can put a table of contents in the front, but do not use Word's auto function as this won't work. Just type in your table of contents manually at the front of your book.
• You can use embedded-in-Word jpegs, more on that later. How to incorporate charts and bullet points is a more complex issue, so explore that as a separate and additional body of knowledge.
• Use single spacing and Times New Roman 12 point font, and insert a page break at the end of each chapter so your text does not run on.
• Lastly, and this is the most important -- do not use tabs for your paragraph indents. If you know how to use Word's style function then work on a template for an ebook. If you don't know how to do this and don't want to spend hours learning how, then manually pop in 5-7 spaces as your indent.
Download a free reader called Mobipocket Reader and check how your book will look, before you hop on to the Kindle self-publishing site. There are ways to link your chapters (listed in the table of contents) to your chapter headings, but that can get a bit complicated so for now, this is the basic stuff. When you are happy with your finished Word doc or docx, then save it and then save again in the Word menu as "Web Page, Filtered". Ignore the Word box about "this will remove formatting etc.) as this is what you need to do. You will have two versions, now -- a regular Word file and an HTML one.
When you upload you'll be using the HTML file. If you have embedded photos in the Word doc then look for a separate folder that's been saved automatically with your photos in it. Try and file it next to your HTML doc, so you can upload together when you're at the Kindle self-publishing site. These photos will then, hopefully, plop themselves right back into your document/novel/short story/best seller, in exactly the right place. They will automatically appear in the reader you use to check before publishing. As you write, by the way, make your characters' names appropriate to your novel's setting. I used Meryneith, Kemsa, Quasshie, Thoth, Aapep, and Asim to make my book about Ancient Egypt come alive.
By Jens E Huebner
Epublishing came to be extremely popular in the last few years. It's quite a bit different to print publishing, as most of us know. With Kindle's direct to the Kindle/Amazon site, anyone can publish their own books in almost an instant. What a way to read aspiring new authors as well as seasoned vets! Printed books are always popular, and now anyone can add the electronic versions as well. This will increase sales, and give encouragement to your writing efforts. Pick a genre for your novel, such as a thriller or romance, and setting -- Ancient Egypt, for instance.
Formats for Epublishing depend a lot on which platform you are publishing on, so I can tell you a little about Kindle only, at the moment. When you publish on Kindle you can also tell customers on your website how to download an app for their iPad. This enables the stunning graphics which iPad possesses, to really highlight your Kindle-published book. This iPad Kindle app is free from the app store.
The nitty-gritty:
• Using Word, and saving in doc or docx, set your margins to a half inch and page size to 5" by 7". This will give you the approximate visual look of an ebook.
• Do not put any kind of header or footer or page numbers in there. These are useless for ebooks as the customer can resize the page as they wish.
• You can put a table of contents in the front, but do not use Word's auto function as this won't work. Just type in your table of contents manually at the front of your book.
• You can use embedded-in-Word jpegs, more on that later. How to incorporate charts and bullet points is a more complex issue, so explore that as a separate and additional body of knowledge.
• Use single spacing and Times New Roman 12 point font, and insert a page break at the end of each chapter so your text does not run on.
• Lastly, and this is the most important -- do not use tabs for your paragraph indents. If you know how to use Word's style function then work on a template for an ebook. If you don't know how to do this and don't want to spend hours learning how, then manually pop in 5-7 spaces as your indent.
Download a free reader called Mobipocket Reader and check how your book will look, before you hop on to the Kindle self-publishing site. There are ways to link your chapters (listed in the table of contents) to your chapter headings, but that can get a bit complicated so for now, this is the basic stuff. When you are happy with your finished Word doc or docx, then save it and then save again in the Word menu as "Web Page, Filtered". Ignore the Word box about "this will remove formatting etc.) as this is what you need to do. You will have two versions, now -- a regular Word file and an HTML one.
When you upload you'll be using the HTML file. If you have embedded photos in the Word doc then look for a separate folder that's been saved automatically with your photos in it. Try and file it next to your HTML doc, so you can upload together when you're at the Kindle self-publishing site. These photos will then, hopefully, plop themselves right back into your document/novel/short story/best seller, in exactly the right place. They will automatically appear in the reader you use to check before publishing. As you write, by the way, make your characters' names appropriate to your novel's setting. I used Meryneith, Kemsa, Quasshie, Thoth, Aapep, and Asim to make my book about Ancient Egypt come alive.
By Jens E Huebner
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