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Formatting problem on book on Amazon
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Did you change the margins to what they wanted? They are really picky about that. I forgot to change one and things were wonky.
Check out Guido Henkel's book, "The Zen of Ebook Formatting." If you don't want to go that route, I format eBooks at a flat rate of $50 if you need help. Satisfaction guaranteed.
I managed to get the book for free and I'm looking at it on my tablet. Though most of it seems okay, there are places where the indentations are all over the shop. Worst of all, breaks I definitely inserted don't seem to be there any more, meaning scenes don't start and finish where they should. I'm seriously considering taking it down and starting again.
Try downloading Calibre (it's free) and converting your manuscript to an ePub. Upload the ePub version to Amazon and see if that corrects the wonky title page.
I use Calibre also. My way is to input HTML to Calibre, and then run the resulting EPUB through the Kindle Previewer, which is also a free download from Amazon. That way you get to see how it looks before you input it, and whether or not the TOC and Goto menus work okay.
True, and that goes for me, too. I save my doc as HTML and let Calibre do the work. Whatever Calibre doesn't fix, the Kindle Previewer usually does.
How do you save it as HTML? Do you save it as webpage filtered like you were uploading it to KDP?
I use LibreOffice and on the upper left, on the taskbar, I have a choice of "save" or "save as." I click on "save as" to get the menu, and then specify an HTML doc. I think Word has the same arrangement. It's just a doc you can load anywhere you can any other doc. In your computer file it's indicated by the logo of whatever browser you use.
For KDP a Word document is saved as Webpage, Filtered.
Rachael wrote: "Hi, I was wondering if you could give me some advice. I've just uploaded my new book to Amazon. I was only able to submit it as a Microsoft Word doc, and while there was no such issue with the orig..."Which version of Word are you using?
Are you uploading to KDP or CreateSpace?
I used the CreateSpace Word template to build my interior design, using Word 2016, and then CreateSpace transferred the design to KDP. The table of content wasn't to my liking, so I modified the interior design document and updated it directly in KDP, and that worked just fine. :)
There are a few things you can do here. This is general advice. I'd have to see the file in question to be of any more help. First, make sure you are not using spaces or tabs to format your Word doc -- that will cause no end of problems.
Next, if you are using Word 2010 [best] or Word 2013 [ok], go to "Save As" and save the file as "Web Page - Filtered". The filtered part is critical.
Next, either go to KDP and upload the html file you saved and check it in their on-line previewer, or download their Kindle generator application and run the html file thru that. If it looks OK, you are fine.
If it still looks wrong, there are still formatting problems in your Word doc.
If there are formatting problems in your Word doc, they are caused by (almost all the time) conflicts between manual formatting and styles. Manual formatting is where you clicked "center" to center a paragraph, or set the indent manually, or set the line-spacing manually, or changed the font size, and set the space before or after a paragraph manually.
All these things can cause problems. The best solution is to not do them. Do everything with styles and restrict manual formatting to bold, italic, strikethru and underline. If you are not very familiar with them, learning Word styles will save a great deal of time and headache.
I know nothing about Calibre and based on what I hear, it may clear up many of these issues. But using Word styles and HTML filtered works pretty well.
To produce a truly robust html file for KDP requires a final step that requires understanding style sheets to some degree. Or perhaps Calibre or another program does an acceptable job.
BTW: KDP had online a nice little free pub describing how to get a nicely formatted document in more detail. I'm afraid I can't get the name right now, but I believe if was linked on the KDP site in the Help section.
I hope that is of some use. I'll be happy to go into more specifics via PM.
ok kdp, there's a kindle content creator you can use.
What Owen said...in almost all cases of problems with Word documents, the issue lies in not applying styles correctly.I don't use Word, but I'll add another resource for people who do: the free Smashwords style guide. Even if you don't use Smashwords, it's a good resource, and it includes a template and examples.
Just some addition to things mentioned above:- If you are using LibreOffice/OpenOffice, you can save it to odt. Calibre (and most new software) support it directly.
- The Calibre epubs work fine with KDP. I've only encountered one issue until now, where I had my blurb in a 1x1 table cell to make a box for it. You can also edit the Calibre generated epub to make some fine tuning if you want.
I noticed that if you use .odt with Calibre you have to tweak it a little to get the TOC correct. Using HTML eliminates this, but I've also had the experience that if I didn't run the resulting EPUB through the Kindle previewer, Amazon's Look-Inside feature often converted some paragraphs to italics (although the downloaded book was okay). It may seem too many steps to some, but I've rarely had any problems with it, and those were usually caused by flaws in the updates of Calibre or LibreOffice that were corrected later. I'm not saying you have to use my system, I just put it out there as one that works for me.
When working with Word, I had indent and page break problems as well. For the indent problem place the cursor at the beginning of a paragraph, or you can highlight entire sections to do multiple paragraphs at once. On you original file you need to go to the layout tab, click the little arrow on the bottom right of the paragraph section. This will open up a new window. Under special you have to select "first line" form the drop-down box and click okay at the bottom. Make sure to delete all tabs at the beginning of paragraphs, otherwise you will end up with larger indents than you intend.
For page breaks such as at the end of a chapter, place you cursor at the end of the last sentence and go to the insert tab. Click page break and it will start a new page for another chapter.
To check that everything is in order and to clean up formatting, you can view all spaces, breaks, ect... by clicking on the the small paragraph symbol on the home tab. It is small and looks kind of like a musical note.
To get rid of manual tabs, you can do a find/replace like this:Find: ^t
Replace: (Nothing)
Hi All--I hope you won't mind me jumping into this discussion, but I also have a formatting issue with my Kindle book and I'm appealing to your collective wisdom. If I go to the TOC on my Kindle I can use it to jump from chapter to chapter, but I can't use the chapter forwarding buttons (not the page forwarding buttons but the one at the bottom of the device that allow you to scroll forward, back, up, and down) to jump from chapter to chapter. As far as I can tell I followed the formatting instructions to the letter and everything else works perfectly. I have occasionally also encountered this problem in other people's books, but normally they work fine. I wrote the original manuscript in Office For Mac 2008 but updated to the 2016 for the final edit and upload, by the way. Any thoughts would be welcome!
change manual page breaks to column breaks
I found I had problems with formatting with Kindle as well until I created an epub first. As mine are Children's Chapter Books, not only was the text scrambled, the illustrations didn't exist. Epub solved the problem.
What can I do? It looks terrible as it is, and may well impair sales. I don't want readers to think I'm a shonky amateur. The only thing I can think of that may have caused this is to begin with it was spaced out (it's listing the articles of the Robotics Code), but I was told to close the spaces. Might that have affected the formatting?
I've worked so hard on this book. I'd hate it to fail due to something so trivial. Please could you advise me what to do next?