Formatting For Kindle! Read online

  This is another classical beginner mistake and it is more common when you want to copy and paste text from a book you have already written into a new book that is Kindle-friendly.

  In the next two chapters you will also learn how to avoid this common beginner mistake as well so you can create perfect, stunningly professional Kindle-friendly eBooks right from the start!

  Why make a lots of beginner mistakes if you can make it correct right from the beginning?

  Before we finally get into the simple step-by-step guide in writing your very first Kindle book, whether it is from scratch or by copying and pasting from your already written book, there is one more common mistake I want to cover that you should avoid at all costs.

  If you are in a hurry and you are not doing things systematically correct from the beginning, you may end up with a Kindle eBook that may look great with all chapter-headers, text and line spacing between them but still having a table of contents that looks disgustingly unprofessional such as this one:

  This looks like someone was messing around with you, April fooling with you or playing a prank on you!

  It looks really horrible!

  Can you spot what makes it look really horrible?

  Good job my friend!

  Yes! It is the fact that the Table of Contents has missing items in its list.

  That can only occur when you miss a certain step in the guide which you now are aware of and you will be more considerable when following the guide in the two upcoming chapters!

  Another thing you should also avoid when creating the table of contents is to having it aligned from the left to the right.

  Always align it centered, since that looks more appealing and professional for the average Kindle eBook-reader.

  Chapter 3: How to create your First Kindle eBook From Scratch!

  Alright!

  You have read the first two chapters.

  The first one was to motivate you by telling you the short story of how I got involved in this whole realm of Kindle eBook writing and publishing.

  The second one was to go through some common mistakes people make when they try to figure out Kindle eBook writing and formatting for themselves.

  I think it is a good idea and a huge time-saver for you, to just follow the simple instructions outlined here below so you get it right the first time.

  That way, you want have to waste hours of doing something that isn’t working and you won’t need to call for help immediately.

  It is my goal with this book to make sure you can create your very first own Kindle eBook without having to look on the Internet for how to do it!

  Let me now list all the simple steps that you will go through when writing and creating a Kindle eBook from scratch, and then we will go through each step separately, using lots of great visual illustrations:

  Step #1 of 9: Right-click on your desktop, go to “New”, then to “Microsoft Office Word Document” and left-click on that.

  Step #2 of 9: Double left-click on the icon you have created or left-click on it and hit the “Enter”-key on your keyboard.

  Step #3 of 9: Choose Normal from Styles, Change Font type to Times New Roman, Font size to 36, Center-align, Make It Bold and Write Your Main & Sub title for your eBook.

  Step #4 of 9: How to Insert Page Breaks after eBook Title and at the end of Chapters by left-clicking on the “Insert”-tab and “Page Break”-button.

  Step #5 of 9: Writing copyright, disclaimer, terms and conditions text using Times New Roman font type in size 11.

  Step #6 of 9: Writing the Dedication part by hitting enter a few times, changing Font size to 24, center-align, type Dedication, hit enter, change Font size to 11 again, write the dedication text, then enter and insert page break.

  Step #7 of 9: Writing your very first chapter that is 100 % Kindle-ready by choosing Heading 1 in Styles, typing header name, pressing enter, writing your paragraphs and inserting a paragraph after the last character which is usually the dot, question-mark or exclamation-mark.

  Step #8 of 9: Inserting Table of Contents by placing the cursor before the first character of the first chapter-header name, then going to the “Reference”-tab, left-click on “Table of Contents”-button, then on “Insert Table of Contents” and uncheck the “Show page numbers”-box and check the “User hyperlinks instead of page numbers”-box and click OK.

  Step #9 of 9: Fixing the Table of Contents by inserting a Bookmark in front of the “T” (the first letter in Table of Contents) and for the Start and Cover as well and finally make it work with the free Kindle Previewer software by uninstalling the Windows Internet Explorer 9 program.

  Step 1/9: Right-click on your desktop, go to “New”, then to “Microsoft Office Word Document” and left-click on that.

  The first step is to create a Microsoft Word document on your desktop (or wherever you might want it on your computer).

  Right-click with your mouse anywhere on your desktop and you should see this first list popup.

  Then you move your mouse so it selects the label “New” and suddenly the next list rolls up.

  Move your mouse now down to the blue-like icon labeled “Microsoft Office Word Document” and select it by left-clicking with your mouse.

  You should now have created a Microsoft Office Word Document file that either ends with .DOCX or .DOC in its name.

  Step 2/9: Double left-click on the icon you have created or left-click on it and hit the “Enter”-key on your keyboard.

  The second step is when you have successfully created the Microsoft Word Document it should look something like this (unless you have changed its name).

  Now you want to open it by either left-clicking on it with your mouse and then hitting the “Enter”-key on your keyboard or just double left-click on it with your mouse.

  It is important that you make sure that you have created an icon that looks something like this with the W-character in its picture.

  Otherwise you might have created the wrong file and thus all the next steps will not be able to guide you correctly.

  When you have your Microsoft Word document opened, there are three important places you will go very often.

  The first one is this:

  You will change the Font type (currently Times New Roman) and Font size (currently 36) a few times throughout this guide so remember this!

  The second one is this:

  You will click on the different alignment-buttons (the middle one currently highlighted, thus chosen) to align your chapter headers and table of contents.

  This makes your eBook look much more professional when things are aligned in certain ways.

  Make sure as well, that if you center-align one chapter-header you will need to center-align all chapter-headers!

  Otherwise it will look inconsistent and less professional as a result.

  The third and last one you will return back to when working is this one:

  These are the “Styles”-buttons (Normal currently highlighted thus chosen) and they are extremely important to understand how they work!

  When you select text in your document and you click on one of the “Styles”-buttons your selected text will change into that “style” so to speak.

  This means that your selected text will take all the properties you have for that particular “style”.

  The different “Styles”-buttons you will switch back and forth between are the Normal (currently selected in the picture), Heading 1 (and optionally Heading 2 depending on how many sub-headers you want in your eBook).

  If you do not choose the Heading 1-style when writing your chapter-headers, the insertion of Table of Contents will be a mess and it will look horribly wrong when uploading it to KindleStore.

  Therefore it is important you get familiar with how your text is affected by you selecting it and choosing differently “Style”-buttons here above.

  Step3/9: Choose Normal from Styles, Change Font type to Times New Roman, Font size to 36, Center-align, Make It Bold a
nd Write Your Main & Sub title for your eBook.

  You can choose Font types by left-clicking in the box named “Cambria” at the moment and then you will get a list with all the available font types.

  Choose Times New Roman here since that one is guarantees to always work 100 % properly when creating eBooks for the KindleStore.

  After that you left-click in the font size box (right next to the Font type box) and type the number 36 and hit the “Enter”-key on your keyboard.

  You should now have the Font type Times New Roman and Font size 36.

  The next sub-step is to make your cursor get center-aligned.

  You center-align your cursor by left-clicking in the middle of these line-buttons that you see in this picture illustrating the Paragraph-part.

  When you have selected the center-alignment choice it should be highlighted by yellow color (as seen in the picture above).

  When your cursor is center-aligned, left-click on the B-button so it is highlighted yellow (as seen in the picture below).

  Now first hit the “Enter”-key on your keyboard and finally, you write your main title for your eBook.

  After that you hit the “Enter”-key on your keyboard, change the font size to 24 and make the B-button not highlighted yellow (thus it is unselected).

  Now you write your sub title for your eBook.

  If everything successful up to this point you should see something looking like this:

  If you have your cursors now at the end of your sub title (which would be after the e in my case), hit the “Enter”-key on your keyboard one more time so your cursor is below your eBook sub title.

  Step 4/9: How to Insert Page Breaks after eBook Title and at the end of Chapters by left-clicking on the “Insert”-tab and “Page Break”-button.

  I now want to introduce you to one more important section of Microsoft Word that you will come back to a few times throughout this guide.

  If you look again where your Font type (Times New Roman) box is, above it you will find a tab named “Insert”.

  Left-click on it with your mouse! This should suddenly show you this:

  Now, you might have guessed which button here is very important, namely, the “Page Break”-button.

  You want to always click on this one at the end of every chapter you have written.

  You left-click the “Insert”-tab and then on the “Page Break”-button when you cursor is at the right side of the last character of your last line in your last paragraph in your chapter.

  But first, you want to hit the “Enter”-key on your keyboard a few times, change your Font size to 22 (by first left-clicking on the “Home”-tab to come back where you were) and type your author name you will use (whether it is your real name or pen-name).

  When things are correctly done you end up something looking like this:

  Now you want to have your cursor just below your chosen author name (illustrated above), navigate to the “Insert”-tab and left-click with your mouse on the “Page-Break”-button.

  What will happen now is that your cursor will jump down to the next page on the very first line, still center-aligned and still with the same Font type (Times New Roman), Font size (24) and Style (Normal).

  If it looks something like this (see picture above) now in your Microsoft Word document you have successfully used your “Page Break”-button!

  This is what you want to happen every single time you have written your last character in your last line in your last paragraph in your current chapter and your cursor is just on the right side of your dot.

  Then you want to go to the “Insert”-tab and choose the “Page Break”-button.

  Following this simple procedure you avoid any of mistakes discussed in previous chapter on having chapter-headers not to always appear on a new page.

  Step 5/9: Writing copyright, disclaimer, terms and conditions text using Times New Roman font type in size 11.

  We are now going to write copyright text, disclaimer text, (and optionally terms and conditions text depending on w hat kind of eBook you are writing; for avoiding any possible lawsuits I highly recommend you write all of them).

  On your new page that you got to after the first Page Break you can now click on the Normal-button in the “Styles”-section.

  What will happen now is that your cursor will get left-aligned and your Font type will become Calibri (Body) and Font size will become 11 (see picture below).

  We face an annoying problem here as you can see. We want the Font type to always become Times New Roman when we hit on Normal-, Heading -1-buttons and so forth in the “Styles”-section.

  How do we change this so it becomes Times New Roman and not Calibri (Body)?

  The answer lies in you first right-clicking (NOT left-clicking) on the Normal-style button that you find in the “Styles”-section when the “Home”-tab is chosen.

  When you do that you will see a list of choices popup looking like this:

  Choose here the item labeled “Modify…” by left-clicking (NOT right-clicking this time) on it with your mouse. You will now see this window:

  And as you can see you can choose the Font type for the Normal-style and that means every single time you choose the Normal-style the selected text (or paragraph) will transform to Times New Roman Font type with Font size 11 (which is right next to the Font type). Left-click on OK when done.

  You can save your document anytime you want by holding down the CTRL-key on your keyboard and simultaneously hit the S-key on your keyboard and after that you release the CTRL-key.

  When you have successfully changed the Font type to Times New Roman for your Normal-style you can start writing the copyright text that follows something similar to this:

  The way I got the so called copyright-sign © is to both type (c) and then hit space.

  When you first type ( and then c and then ) and then hit space your (c) transforms into © automatically!

  Another way is to hold down your ALT-key on your keyboard and simultaneously press the following numbers that are around your NumLock-key (look around your keyboard; they are to your right side).

  Hold down your ALT-key and press the following four numbers in a row (one hit per number): 0169

  When you hold down your ALT-key and press 0169 and then let go of your ALT-key you also create the ©-sign!

  These are just two ways of creating it.

  As you can also see in the picture above I first wrote “© 2012 Author Name, All Rights Reserved.” and then I hit the “Enter”-key on the keyboard to get to a new paragraph and I bolded the text by click on the B-button in the “Font”-section found in the “Home”-tab.

  Then I wrote a classical copyright text in bolded text that you can copy exactly if you want to.

  Then I hit “Enter”-key once again and I write in all uppercase letters: “DISCLAIMER:” and here you can choose whether you also want to include “terms” and/or “conditions”.

  What I usually type in mine is that “The eBook has no guarantees whatsoever it is meant to be read for pure entertainment only”.

  Feel free to look at the disclaimer and terms and conditions in the beginning of this book to get some ideas!

  After I have written the text I will hit “Enter”-key once again to get just below my last paragraph.

  Guess what I will do next?

  Exactly! I will insert a “Page Break” which is done by going to the “Insert”-tab and left-click with your mouse on the “Page Break”-button.

  This takes us to another page and here you want to still use the Normal-style in the “Styles”-section in the “Home”-tab.

  Step 6/9: Writing the Dedication part by hitting enter a few times, changing Font size to 24, center-align, type Dedication, hit enter, change Font size to 11 again, write the dedication text, then enter and insert page break.

  Press the “Enter”-key exactly two times on your keyboard.

  Change your Font type to 24 and yellow highlight the B-button as well under the
“Font”-section in the “Home”-tab.

  Center-align your cursor using by choosing, under the “Paragraph”-section in the “Home”-tab, the yellow-highlighted choice (as seen in the picture below).