Adventures in File Formatting For Kindle

I deliberated for a long time, and after much thought, I decided to go into Self-Publishing. Perhaps I'm impatient, maybe even arrogant, but I decided I didn't want my fate to fall in the hands of editors. I wanted to control my writing fate myself. I came to this conclusion after being at a writing panel that had four different editors moderating it. The first thing I learned was each editor saw my story differently, and none of them agreed. It reminded me of my writing group and the comments I get from them on stories I have them critique. I have to decide which comments to listen to and which to disregard. In that moment, I realized editors weren't the gods I envisioned them as being, they were mere mortals just like myself, and just like my writing group. Editors are not all knowing. They don't have a crystal ball that will tell them who the next great writer will be. I will always value the suggestions I get from editors, but in the end, there can only be one God of the universes I create and that's me.

So comes the great challenge of self-publishing, and that is correctly formatting your files for digital and print. I'm no expert on this, but I have learned a couple of tricks that might help others that come to the same conclusion as me, self-publishing is the way to go. Let the readers decide my fate.

First off, before you upload any work to Amazon, read their guide! Don't assume the file looks good in word so it will look good on the kindle. Big fat wrong! Apparently, there are hidden symbols inside your word document that don't play well with the MOBI conversion. You have to remove those symbols from your document or you'll end up with a conversion mess, especially if you used the tab key to indent or space bar to indent. In word you have a toggle button that looks like this ¶ . You may have never paid attention to it. You will now. Push that button and see what happens. I'll wait while you try it. … Yes, it added lots of dots and other weird-looking symbols to the document. Don't worry, when you push the button again, they will go away. That button is called the show/hide button and it's going to be your new best friend.

I'm going to start out with indenting because it gave me the hardest problem. While writing in word, you can't use the tab key or the space bar to indent anymore. I know what you're thinking, how am I going to indent then? I asked the same question and finally found an answer I could understand at Smashwords. Their Style guide was far more helpful to someone who knows nothing about Word, like myself, than Amazon's guide which assumes you know what you're doing in word. Before you start typing, you have to pick a style which you'll find at the top of word somewhere depending on what version of Word you use. I use version 2010 and the styles are right up top to the right a little in big squares you can click. You'll want to click normal style. Now you type and when you hit enter to end your paragraph and start a new one, it will indent automatically. It's like magic! You can right-click on the style if you want to customize the indent and the line and paragraph spacing. No more tab, no more space bar.

I know what you're thinking now. I am a mind reader! But what about all the files I've already made in the past where I used Tab or space bar! Don't panic. Hit your hide/show button on one of those files. At every indent you may see dots or you may see an arrow and in some cases you may see dots and arrows. All those dots and arrows have to go. You can do it the hard way and start highlighting and deleting them, or you can use the find and replace tool. Whatever you got, arrows or dots, highlight it, copy it, then go to find and replace, paste it in, it will be invisible, and leave the replace part blank. When you hit OK, they will all disappear! Hurray! If for some reason all your indents disappear too, don't worry. The Kindle conversion will automatically indent the beginning of each paragraph for you as long as this symbol ¶ is at the end of each paragraph. If it isn't then start putting it there. You don't want this symbol  at the end of paragraphs. The conversion will ignore it so get rid of it, NOW! Before it's too late.

OK that's all I'm discussing today because I'm worn out, and I have other things to do like eat lunch and take a nap afterward. I may talk more about this, I don't know yet. But if I don't read the guides above that I linked to. It will save you a lot of headaches. Til next time.