E-Book Formatting
When I started writing my first book, in 2016, I was still worried about getting the formatting right for my e-book. For years, I had read books about writing and self-publishing a book on Amazon. The first things I read, said that you would have to save your Microsoft Word file to HTML and learn how to modify that, to really get your e-book formatting just right. Then, as I was writing the book, I read Rick Smith’s book “Self-Publishing Masterclass”. He wrote that the KDP software that allowed you to upload your book in the doc and docx Word format, had been so improved, that he recommended not bothering with HTML anymore. I know some HTML, but I’m far from any kind of expert with it, so I decided to upload my book in the docx format and hope for the best. I have a Kindle Voyage e-reader, and as I was writing my book, I would email my current file to my Kindle, and it always looked good.
Just be aware that the final published product will be a little different. The documents I sent to my Kindle and my iPad before final publishing, do not have automatic hyphenation, and lines that you have setup in Word with non-breaking spaces and hyphens will display exactly the way you want. But if you buy your published Kindle e-book, it will have automatic hyphenation and your non-breaking spaces may be broken.
Let me explain in more detail. When you preview your file by sending it to your Kindle or iPad, the only hyphens you will see at the end of a line, will be ones that you put there. Words like e-book, hi-res, and 18-year-old, may be split at the end of a line, but no words that don’t already have a hyphen will be split. Your published e-book will have some words that are split at the end of a line by the Kindle device software and the Kindle Reader app for iPads and iPhones. I think that’s because Amazon wants their devices and apps to read like a real book, so they have full justification and auto-hyphening just like professionally published physical books.
The extra hyphening doesn’t bother me. I just read parts of my published e-book, and it amazed me how easily we read right through split words without even noticing them. But the breaking of non-breaking spaces is a little more worrisome. I have a few lines in my book that represent listings of filenames in a computer directory. These are lines of text that are longer than the line length of a normal Kindle display, so extra spaces have been inserted for full justification, and some auto-hyphenation has occurred where there is no hyphen in the file name. So, I will spend some time investigating to see how easy that may be to fix. When I find that out I will report it in a future post. If you know anything about it, please leave a comment. In the meantime, if you are writing a book, continue using non-breaking spaces if you need to, because your paperback edition will appear exactly as you see it in your Word Page Layout View. That’s because your upload to CreateSpace for your paperback will be in pdf format, and that is created by saving your Word file in pdf, and that process will not change your final result.
By the way, if you want to have a hyphen that isn’t broken automatically, just type Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen. If you want a space that isn’t split at the end of a line, type Ctrl+Shift+Space. One last keyboard shortcut, the copyright symbol © can be typed by pressing Alt+Ctrl+C.
Just be aware that the final published product will be a little different. The documents I sent to my Kindle and my iPad before final publishing, do not have automatic hyphenation, and lines that you have setup in Word with non-breaking spaces and hyphens will display exactly the way you want. But if you buy your published Kindle e-book, it will have automatic hyphenation and your non-breaking spaces may be broken.
Let me explain in more detail. When you preview your file by sending it to your Kindle or iPad, the only hyphens you will see at the end of a line, will be ones that you put there. Words like e-book, hi-res, and 18-year-old, may be split at the end of a line, but no words that don’t already have a hyphen will be split. Your published e-book will have some words that are split at the end of a line by the Kindle device software and the Kindle Reader app for iPads and iPhones. I think that’s because Amazon wants their devices and apps to read like a real book, so they have full justification and auto-hyphening just like professionally published physical books.
The extra hyphening doesn’t bother me. I just read parts of my published e-book, and it amazed me how easily we read right through split words without even noticing them. But the breaking of non-breaking spaces is a little more worrisome. I have a few lines in my book that represent listings of filenames in a computer directory. These are lines of text that are longer than the line length of a normal Kindle display, so extra spaces have been inserted for full justification, and some auto-hyphenation has occurred where there is no hyphen in the file name. So, I will spend some time investigating to see how easy that may be to fix. When I find that out I will report it in a future post. If you know anything about it, please leave a comment. In the meantime, if you are writing a book, continue using non-breaking spaces if you need to, because your paperback edition will appear exactly as you see it in your Word Page Layout View. That’s because your upload to CreateSpace for your paperback will be in pdf format, and that is created by saving your Word file in pdf, and that process will not change your final result.
By the way, if you want to have a hyphen that isn’t broken automatically, just type Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen. If you want a space that isn’t split at the end of a line, type Ctrl+Shift+Space. One last keyboard shortcut, the copyright symbol © can be typed by pressing Alt+Ctrl+C.
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