Using Style Sheets

When you are formatting books for either eBook or printed book publication, you should be sure to set up style sheets. A style sheet contains named font and paragraph formatting options that can be selectively applied to your text. Here I am assuming you are using Microsoft Word for writing your documents but style sheets can also be used with other word processors and Desktop Publishing packages. If you are not familiar with Word style sheets, you may want to follow Microsoft’s tutorial.

If you haven’t already got a style sheet, you need to create one – just load a blank document and save it as a Word template. Then set up styles by right-clicking text with the format you want and, from the mouse menu, select Styles, Save as New Quick Style. Make sure the full styles palette is visible. From Word’s Home ribbon page, click the little arrow-box at the bottom right of the style palette (the thing showing all the character styles) to dock it at the side of your screen.

Now, when you want to modify a style, click the arrow to its right in the docked palette and select Modify.

Make changes in the dialog box and click the Format button to select other categories of style attribute that you may want to change. I don’t plan on explaining all the options here so if you aren’t already familiar with styles, you may want to spend some time experimenting with the possibilities.

Important: when you make a change, be sure that the option ‘New documents based on this template’ is selected. If not, the style changes will not be persisted for use in other documents. You want at least one template for use in multiple documents so this is really important.

Once you’ve got a template, you can apply it to new documents by loading it in this way. Select File, Options. Click Add-ins. In the drop-down list at the bottom-left, pick Templates. Then click Go, click Attach, browse to your template and select it. Make sure ‘automatically update documents styles’ is checked. Click Open. The template will now be applied to your document and the text will be reformatted if the template styles match the existing formatting. If not, you will need to select your text, then select the various style names from the palette to apply them.

For basic Kindle formatting, most style options are ignored so you shouldn’t need to spend too long setting them up. The Kindle Formatting web site also has lots of useful information: http://kindleformatting.com/

For a printed book (for example, via CreateSpace or Lulu), you need to devote a lot more care to formatting. Every formatting change you make will be reproduced exactly on the printed page so don’t skip the details. Just to give you some guidance on how to create your body text, you should either make changes to the Normal style or (which is, I think, better), create a new style based on the Normal style. I use a style called BodyCopy. For most books, a Serif font (a ‘curly’ variety) is the best choice and either Palatino and Garamond are two favourites.

The font I’ve used in my novels is Garamond, full justified, with a line spacing of exactly 14 points and a first-line indent of 0.5 inches (set these options from the Modify Styles dialog – you’ll need to click the Format button and the bottom and choose Paragraph). I’ll discuss this more fully in another article.

Formatting a Kindle Book For Lulu or CreateSpace

So you’ve published your book to Kindle. Now you want to release it as a paperback. The two main ‘print-on-demand’ options you might consider are CreateSpace or Lulu. The main advantage of CreateSpace is that it’s affiliated with Amazon so getting your book listed on Amazon will (presumably) be fairly straightforward. Lulu has the benefit that the company prints books internationally – not just in the USA – so if you want make it available to buyers in other countries (and as a UK author, I certainly do!), Lulu is a better choice. Bear in mind that your Lulu books will be listed on Amazon too as long as you given them an ISBN number (this is available free from Lulu).

Whichever service you choose, the next task you face is getting your book formatted for print. I am assuming here that you have written the book in Microsoft Word. If you have used another word processor or a Desktop Publishing program, the tasks you need to undertake will, of course, be rather different, though the principles are the same.

Traditional Kindle books have very simple formatting without fancy layout and named fonts. To make your text look good in print, you need to put some effort into reformatting your text to fit onto a specific page size, use named fonts, apply formatting effects such as indents, page numbering or section numbering and so forth. In this article, I’ll explain the first step – getting your text to fit onto the page.

First, decide on the size of your book. My book is a novel and the standard size (on Lulu anyway) is 6 inches wide by 9 inches tall which is called US Trade. Lulu supplies pre-formatted page ‘templates’ in various sizes and I’d suggest that you begin by downloading one of these from here: http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Cover-Formatting/What-dimensions-should-my-book-cover-images-have/ta-p/33279 The CreateSpace templates are found here: https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/InteriorPDF.jsp

As I am publishing to Lulu, the rest of this article describes what I did using the Lulu template. I would expect the process to be similar for CreateSpace but I have no personal experience of that.

First, bear in mind that, while Lulu and CreateSpace call these documents ‘templates’ they are not what Word calls templates. In Word a template has the extension ‘.dotx’ or (in older versions of Word) ‘.dot’. A Word template is used as a repository for reusable styling information that can be loaded into one or more existing documents. The ‘templates’ supplied by Lulu and CreateSpace are ordinary Word (.doc) documents. If you haven’t yet written your book you could, I suppose, start writing it into one of these empty documents. In my case, my book already existed. I decided to use the downloaded ‘template’ as a reference guide. I examined its page-sizing properties and simply copied these into my existing document (actually I first made a new copy of my novel's document because I didn’t want any changes I made to affect the one that was already formatted for Kindle).

So, without more ado. This is what I did. I loaded Lulu’s US Trade template document and then selected Page Layout, Size, More Paper Sizes.

A dialog appeared showing me the Custom size details. These are the settings that were shown in each of the three tabbed pages.

I made a note of all these settings and just copied them into the same ‘Page Setup’ dialog pages for the document containing my novel. Then I saved it. The end result is that my text was formatted to fit on the pages of a 6” x 9” book. You would, of course, need to copy different settings if you are printing to a different size of book.

That’s just the start, however. I next had to apply a whole range of formatting options to make the text look nice on the printed page. I’ll have more to say about that in another article.

Kindle Author's Pre-Publishing Checklist

I’ve just published my third Kindle book (this is the second novel in my ‘1980s New Romantic Murders’ series) and, once again, I realised that I had forgotten all the niggly little things I needed to do in order to get my manuscript ready for publication. To help me (and other Kindle authors!) remember in future, I decided to jot down some notes – and here they are...

I’m assuming here that you will be using Microsoft Word and that you’ve done all the obvious things such as proof-read your manuscript, fixed any grammar errors, spellchecked the text etc. I’m, also assuming that you’ve read Amazon’s Kindle Formatting guide in the Help section of their KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) site.

Right, so what next?

1) Check that the formatting is correct (for example, that there are no funny fonts that shouldn’t be there).

2) If Track Changes is on (in Word’s Review panel), make sure that all changes are accepted (Changes/Accept all Changes in Document). Forget to do this and you may end up with text that you thought you’d altered or deleted being included in your published book!

3) Add Page Breaks. After every chapter, make sure there is a Page Break (keyboard shortcut is CTRL+ENTER). You can verify the breaks are where they are supposed to be by viewing hidden formatting (either click the Show/Hide icon in the Home/Paragraph panel of the Word ribbon or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT-* being sure to use the * on the 8 key at the top of your keyboard).

4) Add a Table of Contents (see HERE for guidance).

5) Add start and toc bookmarks so that Kindle will be able to find the start of the text and the Table Of Contents.

6) Create a cover image – 600 pixels wide, 800 pixels height in JPG format.

7) Save as Filtered HTML, and create Kindle-format book using Mobipocket Creator. See: Kindle Publishing, First Steps. Being sure to add the cover image and guides to go to the start and toc bookmarks (see Step 4 above).

8) Prepare all the Book details you’ll need to enter when you upload the book to Amazon. These include:

Book Name
Serial Title (if there is one) and Volume Number (if this is a series)
Description – the ‘blurb’ that will be shown under your book on Amazon.
Categories (the sections of the virtual bookstore into which the book naturally ‘fits’ – e.g. Humorous, Crime, Espionage)
Search keywords: Up to 7 keywords or phrases separated by commas that may help potential readers to find your book: e.g. murder, mystery, crime, detective, thriller, romance, British murder mystery

9) Go to the Bookshelf area of Amazon’s KPD site. Upload eBook (Amazon’s KDP Help area has guidance on this) – Amazon states that the cover image for the Amazon site should optimally be 500 x 1200 at 72 dpi. However, that results in a weirdly long and thin image. I use the cover image that’s in the book itself- a JPEG at 600x800 and that works just fine. Fill out the title, description, search words and other information which you should have prepared in Step 8.

And that’s it.... (unless I’ve forgotten anything?)

How To Create A Kindle Table Of Contents

When the time came for me to test out my book in the Kindle Previewer, everything was find any dandy – apart from one thing: the pesky table of contents.

There was nothing wrong with the Table Of Contents itself. I’d created one in Microsoft Word and it had been correctly built into my Kindle eBook. It listed all my chapters and when I clicked a chapter entry, it took the reader to that chapter.

The thing that wasn’t working was the Kindle’s built-in navigation to the Table Of Contents (from its ‘Go’ menu which is accessed in various ways according to whether you are using a hardware or software Kindle Reader). Every time I clicked this option I saw this error message...

I spent a couple of days trying to find and fix this problem. I searched numerous web sites and forums and found many explanations, most of which were either incomplete, incomprehensible, vague or just plain wrong. Anyway, I eventually found the solution and in this article I’ll explain all the steps you need to take in order to add a fully functional Table Of Contents.

Create The Table Of Contents

First, you need to generate hyperlinked Table Of Contents. I am going to assume you will do this using Microsoft Word. If you’ve never made a Table Of Contents in Word before, the easiest way to do so is to format all your chapter headings as an outline. You can see the Outline structure either by selecting View/Outline or (as I prefer) by displaying the Document Map, View/Document Map.

Make your Novel Title the root of the Outline (press SHIFT+ALT+Left Arrow) or select the Heading1 Style from the Home toolstrip. For each chapter, either select Heading 2 or indent one level (press SHIFT+ALT+Right Arrow). The end result should be that you have your novel Title shown as the ‘root’ at the top and the left-most level in the Document map and the chapters each indented one level below that.

When you want to generate your Table of Contents, go to a blank area, typically close to the front of the book and select References/Table Of Contents/Insert Table Of Contents.

Set Show Levels to 2 (or 3 if you have more levels in your outline) and turn off page numbers since Kindle books don’t have fixed page numbering. You can also click the Options button to tailor which styles are used to create TOC entries if necessary. When you’ve finished, click OK and Word will insert the Table Of Contents.

You may need to delete items that you don’t want there – for example, the root item (the name of your novel).

In order that Kindle can find your Table Of Contents you also need to insert a bookmark called “toc”. To do that, position your cursor immediately before your Table Of Contents and select Insert/Bookmark. Enter toc and click Add. You should also add a start bookmark at this stage. Position your cursor at the logical start of your book (that is, before the first paragraph of chapter 1), select Insert/Bookmark. Enter start and click Add.

Now save your text as filtered HTML, as explained in my last Blog post. You are now ready to generate your book using the Mobipocket Creator, the basics of which were also explained in my previous post.

Create Your Kindle Document

In summary this is what you need to do:

Step One – Import Your Document

1) You’ve already saved your Word document in Web Page, Filtered HTML format. Let’s assume this file is called MyNovel.html and it’s in the C:\KindleDocs directory.
2) Load Mobipocket Creator.
3) Click Import From Existing File/HTML document.
4) Click Browse to Choose A File. Pick your file – for example, C:\KindleDocs\MyNovel.html.
5) Select a folder into which you want to place your finished publication. Again you may browse to this. Let’s assume the Publication folder is: C:\KindleDocs\Publish
6) Click Import

Mobipocket Creator should now confirm that your file has been imported.

IMPORTANT: At this point you should have two important directories – your Source Directory (containing your original documents) and your Publication Directory (containing files created or copied by Mobipocket Creator).

In my example, my Source Directory is: C:\KindleDocs
My Publication Directory is C:\KindleDocs\Publish

Mobipocket Creator will make subdirectories beneath the Publication Directory and in one of these subdirectories there will be a copy of the original HTML file. For example in my case this is in: C:\KindleDocs\Publish\MyNovel.

Now, to make the TOC and Start links operational, I have to add some ‘Guides’ which refer to the bookmarks in my HTML file.

Step Two - Add 'Guides'

1) Click View/Guide in Mobipocket Creator
2) Click New Guide Item
3) Select Type/toc
4) Add a Filename and a toc link following a hash (#) character.
To do this, click Browse and browse to the COPY of the html file under your Publication Directory – e.g. : C:\KindleDocs\Publish\MyNovel\MyNovel.html. DO NOT browse to the original html file (e.g. : C:\KindleDocs\ MyNovel.html)!
Now edit the file name by appending #toc
The full entry in the File Name should now be the file name itself plus #toc – for example, MyNovel.html#toc
5) Add a start link in the same way. i.e. Click New Guide Item. Select Type/start and browse and edit the file name by addng #start at the end. The text in the file name field should be something like: MyNovel.html#start
6) Click Update

Step Three- Add Cover Image

If you have a cover image add this now.
1) Click View/Cover Image
2) Click Add Cover Image
3) Browse to your Cover image (suggested format JPG, 800x600).
4) Click Open then Click Update.

Step Four - Create Your Publication

You are now ready to generate the finished publication.

Click the Build icon at the top of the screen. Then click the Build button.

If there are any errors or warnings, review these now. If, for example, you added Guides to your original HTML file (in the Source directory) rather than to the one that Mobipocket Creator copied into your Publication directory, you will see Link errors. Guides must be applied to the HTML file in the Publication directory only.

Your publication is now created as a file ending with ‘.prc’ in your Publication directory. Load this into a Kindle Reader or the Kindle Previewer as explained in my last Blog entry. You should now be able to click the Go menu and select Cover, Beginning or Table of Contents to go immediately to your cover image, the text marked with the ‘start’ bookmark and the Table Of Contents marked with the ‘toc’ bookmark.

The proof of the pudding is in the Publishing. I’ve just published my Kindle book on Amazon and if you’d like to verify that my Table Of Contents is full functional, I’d be delighted if you would buy a copy. Naturally, I’d be even more delighted if you then read the book! ;-)

Kindle Publishing, First Steps

You’ve written your book and you are ready to publish it for Amazon Kindle. And (to quote the late, great Elvis Presley) that’s when your heartache begins...

Having previously published a book with Lulu, I was expecting the Kindle publishing process to be similar. That is: you save your book as a PDF file to provide pixel-perfect formatting, upload it and you’re done. Nope, that isn’t the way Kindle works...

This first big shock was that the Kindle preferred document format is not PDF, not PostScript, not LaTeX, not, in fact, anything that is widely used for accurate printing and publishing. On the contrary it is (are you sitting comfortably? I warn you, this may come as a shock...) HTML.

When someone first told me this, my immediate reaction was that they must be wrong. Nobody, but nobody would format a book in HTML. I mean, HTML is a horrible, clunky formatting so-called ‘language’ used for Web pages. Anyone who’s designed Web sites knows that the formatting capabilities of HTML are primitive. It would be next to impossible to lay out a single page of a glossy magazine such as ‘Vogue’ in HTML let alone a whole book.

Even so, HTML is what Kindle uses. And it’s a very basic form of HTML at that. You can’t use complex styles. And if you enhance your text with a variety of fancy fonts, Kindle will disregard the fonts when you publish the book. In fact, just about the only stylistic effects permitted are indentation, bold text, italics, headings and justification.

To get started you need to sign up at Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP): https://kdp.amazon.com. Here you will find a number of guides in the support area: http://forums.kindledirectpublishing.com. One of the problems with these guides is that they are scattered around all over the place. You have to browse down into nested sections in order to locate numerous stand-alone articles. What you won’t find (bizarrely!) is a Kindle book that gathers together all the essential help in one place.

Let me save you some browsing time. The place to start is support article #533 in the Getting Started Guide Section: “Simplified Guide to Building a Kindle Book”. This assumes you will be using Microsoft Word. It tells you how to generate the final text by a) saving the file as ‘Filtered HTML’ (Word provides this option) then b) importing the text using a free tool called the Mobipocket Creator which you can download here: http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscreator.asp. You can add a cover image at this point. As it’s a bit vague on the size and format, let me help you. Use a JPEG format image that is 600 pixels wide and 800 pixels high. Then you click Mobipocket Creator’s Build button to generate the Kindle-formatted output (a file that has the extension ‘.prc’).

Create a Kindle Book in 5 Easy(ish) Steps

First save the Word document as Web Page Filtered

In Mobipocket Creator, click the option to import an HTML document

Browse to your HTML document and click Import

Click the Mobipocket Creator’s Build icon

Click its Build button to create a Kindle-format ‘.prc’ file

You now need to check that your eBook looks OK. It almost certainly won’t, so don’t panic. If my experience is anything to go by, you will be going backwards and forwards between Word and the Mobipocket Creator many times making changes and regenerating the book before it looks anywhere close to ready-to-read.

The quickest way to verify the appearance of your book is by using the Kindle Previewer and a Kindle Reader for your Desktop computer.

The Kindle Reader has the benefit of formatting the text to fill the screen. However, this is not a good representation of the much smaller display of a Kindle reading device. The Kindle Previewer deliberately restricts your view to a Kindle-sized screen. However, in my experience, some formatting effects vary between the two pieces of software so you may want to check that the display of your book is at least acceptable on both.

Download the Kindle Previewer here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621

Download a Kindle Reader here (available for PC, Mac, iPad, Android etc): http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621

Finally, test out your Kindle book. Having installed the Kindle Reader for Windows (seen in the background) I can double-click my prc file to load it. I can also load it into the Kindle Previewer (foreground) from its File menu. The text looks nicer in the Reader but the Previewer is a more accurate representation of the book’s appearance on Kindle reading hardware

For more help on formatting your book for Kindle, I’d recommend the following two sites:

http://www.newselfpublishing.com/WordKindle.html (excellent overview of using Word for Kindle)

http://www.cjs-easy-as-pie.com/ (lots of invaluable articles)

At the time of writing, I still haven’t solved all my Kindle formatting problems and I’ll be soon writing more articles here on the Blog to discuss specific issues. If you are interested in publishing for Kindle, be sure to bookmark this Blog. I plan to talk you through my own experiences and the experiences of other Kindle authors in the months (and, I hope, years) ahead.