Epistolary Formatting for eBooks

In my novel, Love, Carry My Bags, several chapters have a large epistolary component—letters back and forth between the characters. Imagine my nasty surprise when the careful formatting of those letters that I did in Microsoft Word came out quite differently on the Kindle previewer! Grrr.





Not all Kindles or Kindle reading apps are created equal. I know, you are saying to yourself, “duh.” Obviously there are the black and white models and the color models, but I thought that the content stuffing inside would make the words on the page look of the same format. Not true.





Today I’ll share a secret I discovered through trial and error. I read the formatting guidelines, both from Amazon and Smashwords and found nothing about what happens when you want “Love, John” off to the side after a letter has finished…and you don’t want it crawling vertically down the page, most troublesome on the Kindle Touch and Paperwhite models.





Here’s what I found out. Initially, since “we all know by now” that tabs are a no-no in ebook formatting, I followed the instructions and set a paragraph indent of, say, 2.8 inches aligned from the left. Looked great in Word. Tested fine on Kindle and Kindle Fire, iPad. It was only later that I knew of the problem, when a reader mentioned that most of the “sign-offs” appeared vertically down the page at times. After much ado, I discovered that Kindle preserves the large indent as the most important part of the formatting, then crams the individual letters of the words up against the side, causing them to go vertical. (See attachment for before and after examples.)





Here’s the fix. Paragraph format the “Love, John” RIGHT aligned, with an inch indent on the RIGHT. This pushes the words toward the middle-right as one would normally sign a letter. Kindle no longer fights to keep the space in front of the “Love, John,” but instead preserves some space on the back end, keeping the words horizontal as they should be. Since not all Kindles are created equal, some models don’t respect that right indent, but they do respect the right alignment. Some models display “Love, John” horizontally all the way over to the right, and some display the right indent as I intended, either case is much better than the prior formatting fiasco.





Now, if you put a huge right indent, you can cause the same problem on the left side with words going vertical down the page, but if you really want your words that far to the the left, then left align and indent left about an inch.





I used this same trick for the quotation credits at the beginning of my chapters as well, right aligned, right indent a half inch. All better now.





There is a Kindle update to Love, Carry My Bags, fixing this issue. If you have not already gotten it, and need the update, go to Manage Your Kindle, find Love, Carry My Bags in your list of ebooks and click where it shows update available. Anyone buying today will get the most up-to-date version.





I hope this helps! Let me know. Comment below.