Formatting your Masterpiece for the Kindle

Seeing as I said I’d post this two months ago, I thought it was high time I pulled my finger out and actually did it. Hellos are due to some lovely new followers and also a promise that my blog isn’t usually so slow to update. Usually…

Anyway, you came here to learn how to make your work publishable for the Kindle so let’s get on with it, shall we? Everyone seems to have a slightly different way of doing this and the method I’m about to show you is simply what works for me, cobbled together from information written by other helpful people. I live in the Dark Ages and still use Word 2003, but these instructions remain valid for later versions of Word; you just might have to look a bit harder to find some of the features we’ll be using.

Before I begin I’m assuming your novel is saved as one long Word document and not as individual chapters. If it’s not, I’m afraid you’ll have to open up each chapter and cut and paste the whole thing into one document. Don’t worry, I’ll wait here for you…

If you want to include a table of contents (essential if you also want to publish to Smashwords), now might be a good time to create it. If you haven’t already, you’ll also want to include some sort of copyright notice. I use a standard one which looks like this:

 

Dunraven Road

Copyright 2009 – Caroline Barnard-Smith

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people, or events, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

The right of Caroline Barnard-Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

 

You can add other things to your copyright notice if you’d like. I also include credits for my cover designer and cover art and tag on a link to my website.

The layout of my novels looks something like this: Title page – Copyright notice – Dedication – Contents – NOVEL – Acknowledgements – short author bio (About the Author) – blurbs for my other books (Also Available)

Of course, you can set your work out any way you want to, this is just to give you an idea if you don’t have any clue where to start.

I’ll usually include a short preview of one of my other novels as well, about three chapters. Being able to include things like this is one of the great advantages of e-publishing, so don’t miss the opportunity to introduce people to more of your work while your book is still in their hot little hands.

Okay, now I recommend doing what the Smashwords.com Style Guide refers to as ‘nuking’ your document. It sounds more complicated than it actually is; just highlight your entire document and cut and paste into a blank Notepad file. Then highlight the text in the Notepad file and cut and paste into a new, blank Word file. Doing this means that any crappy or corrupt formatting is erased and hopefully you’ll save yourself a lot of problems further down the road.

Next you’ll want to turn on Show All. Show All is your friend. Either find a button on your tool bar that looks like a backwards ‘P’ (this,  in other words) or hit Ctrl + *. Your manuscript should now look like a maniacal clown scribbled all over it but don’t panic, it’s a good thing. All the backward ‘P’s indicate a place where you pressed Enter (or Return if you’re rocking it old school), while the dots appear every time you hit the space bar. Having Show All turned on is really helpful when you’re trying to achieve a uniform look, with a certain number of spaces beneath each chapter or section heading for instance. Now you can actually count how many Enter marks there are, instead of trying to guess. You’ll also be able to see how many times you’ve left a double space at the end of sentences. This one can be a hard habit to break and I do it myself, but it’s not necessary on the Kindle.

An easy way to get rid of them all in one go is to use Word’s Find and Replace function (Ctrl + F). First get rid of those double spaces by simply tapping the space bar twice in the ‘Find What:’ field and pressing ‘Find Next’. Obviously, it looks like you haven’t entered anything for Word to find, but trust me this works. Next you’ll want to get rid of any errant Tabs, usually found at the beginning of paragraphs. Again, this isn’t necessary on the Kindle and they will play havoc with your beautifully polished formatting. Instead of pressing Tab in the Find What field, this time you need to type ^t. Voila, you have an extra-space-and-Tab free document.

Worried that your document all bleeds together without any Tabs or spaces? You can stop worrying because next we’ll be setting up your paragraphs. Highlight the entire text and go to Format / Paragraph. A box like this will pop up:

Adjust the settings as follows:

Alignment: Left

Indentation -

Left: 0 cm

Right: 0 cm

Special -

First line: 0.5 cm

Spacing -

Before: 0 pt

After: 0 pt

Line spacing: 1.5 lines

These settings are just a guide and can be played around with. I use a first line indentation of 0.5 cm, but this can be made larger if you prefer. Just remember that Kindle won’t display first-line indents greater than 1.5 cm. The spacing can also be played around with depending on your preferences. A spacing of 6 pt before and after paragraphs and single line spacing also looks nice, but be aware that some readers find too much space around their paragraphs distracting.

Now you can manually set the nitty gritty elements. This is the bit that takes time, so get comfortable! All your original formatting will have been lost when you nuked the document, so now you’ll have to go through and replace any pictures and put things that were centred back in the centre (by right clicking the object or paragraph and selecting Paragraph / Alignment: Centered). Likewise, anything that was italicised or in bold will also have to be done again.

There will probably be things in your document that you don’t want to be indented along with the rest of your paragraphs. These could include the title page, any copyright notices, the table of contents or the first line of new sections/chapters. Unfortunately, Kindle won’t recognise a first line indent of 0, but you can trick it by right clicking the object or paragraph in question and selecting Indentation – Special: First line, By: 0.1 cm. This creates such a teeny tiny indentation, the reader won’t notice it.

Last but not least, if you have a table of contents you’ll need to link all those chapter headings up to their respective chapters. To do this, highlight each chapter title throughout the document and go to Insert / Bookmark. You’ll be prompted to give the bookmark a name so just call it something easily identifiable like ‘Chap1’, ‘Chap2’ etc. When you’ve done this, go back to your table of contents; highlight each chapter title in the list and right click. Select Hyperlink and click the Bookmarks button in the box that pops up. Now you can scroll through the list and marry each bookmark up with its respective chapter heading. Simple but repetitive, think of it as a type of meditation.

Finally, save your document as Web Page, Filtered. This will produce a .htm file of your work and a separate folder with any pictures you’ve used in it. Highlight the .htm file and the folder and right click. Select Send to, then select Compressed (zipped) folder. A .zip file will magically appear in the same place where you saved your .htm file. This is what you upload to Kindle Direct Publishing.

With a few tweaks and additions and a quick perusal of their Style Guide, you’ll also be able to upload your newly formatted masterpiece to Smashwords. They will distribute it to Apple’s iBookstore and Barnes & Noble among others, so it’s well worth doing. That’s it; crack open the champagne, you’re a published author.

If anyone knows an easier way of completing any of these steps, or a better way, please feel free to comment!

Art or Business? My Take on the John Locke Method

As you may or may not know, I’m currently halfway through my very first blog tour with my new release, Jinn Nation. As well as being a marketing strategy in and of itself, running the tour and getting people to read my guest posts and enter the giveaways has required a lot of marketing and promotion (ie. a lot of social networking). Although I’ve loved doing this and have met some fantastic people along the way, I’m almost looking forward to next week when the tour’s over and I can get back to what I (hope I) do best: writing (I can’t actually manage both, it’s too hard with a 4-month-old!) This mad marketing has got me thinking about the ‘John Locke method’ of selling e-books, a method I wouldn’t personally adopt because for me it means coming down on the side of writing as business rather than writing as art, and this makes the English Literature graduate in me a sad panda.

Not that the John Locke method doesn’t work of course; it works very, very well. If you don’t already know, John Locke is the first indie author to sell 1 million e-books for the Amazon Kindle, an accolade that was previously only held by bestselling traditionally published authors such as Stieg Larsson, James Patterson and Lee Child. One of his latest projects is a how-to guide to marketing and selling your self-published novel called How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!; the blueprint for the ‘John Locke method’, which seems to basically comprise of pricing books at $0.99 and utilising Twitter. There’s nothing wrong with that (although I often wonder how people view $0.99 novels, whether or not they think they must be crappy because they’re so cheap; but then John Locke has sold over a million books in just 5 months doing this and I definitely have not), but it was the line “my books may not be great literature, but they certainly don’t suck… I no longer have to prove my books are as good as theirs [traditional publishers]” from the book’s sample that put me off purchasing it.

I can’t help but believe that books shouldn’t be a ‘paint by numbers’ affair, written only to make money. I think they should be loved and sweated over, whether it’s a novel about a vampire dating a high school cheerleader or an opus dealing with the stuff of the soul. I know writers don’t aim to live in poverty and it would be weird if they did. Marketing and promotion will always be necessary if you want people to take notice of your work, I just feel that as an indie author it can be all too easy to find yourself focusing solely on the marketing, hopped up on success stories like John Locke and Amanda Hocking. Before long you’re studying the bestseller lists and adapting your work to copy what is selling instead of being true to your own interests and inspirations. But maybe that’s just me. After all, didn’t Dickens often write just for the money? He wrote his novels in segments to be published in magazines, each one ending on a cliff-hanger, and I’m sure I read somewhere that he wrote A Christmas Carol to make some quick cash for the festive season, little knowing how popular and influential it would become. I suppose Charles Dickens and John Locke might have made good Twitter buddies if they’d lived in the same century.

There’s still time to follow my blog tour if you haven’t been doing it already (and if you have, you rock!) Vampires.com have already kindly posted an interview with me, and later today they’ll be posting my guest blog about why I created my vampire character, Dylan (although to be honest, he snuck into my brain fully formed and demanded to be included in the completely different story I was writing; there wasn’t that much ‘creation’ involved, it was more of a hold-up on his part). There’s also still time to read my interview and enter the giveaway to win an e-copy of Jinn Nation in any format of your choice (I’m not formatist!) over at Oh, for the Hook of a Book!, or head to Donna’s Blog Home to read a guest blog about my inspirations and check out the best review I’ve ever had I’ve also been leaving exclusive excerpts of Jinn Nation all over the web (I know, I really should clean up after myself…) So if you fancy reading a snippet from my novel that isn’t included in the bog standard Kindle sample, have yourself a look at these wonderful blogs:

No Trees Harmed
Donna’s Blog Home
Oh, for the Hook of a Book!

Look out for more giveaways, excerpts and blog posts towards the end of the week!

The New Novel is Unleashed!

I can’t quite believe it but I stuck to my own deadline (there’s a first time for everything) and Jinn Nation is now available to buy for the Amazon Kindle – Amazon UK / Amazon US. It’s also listed at Smashwords where you can get a copy for your Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo and lots of other e-readers.

I haven’t used Smashwords before but I was impressed. It was really easy to upload there and the formatting I had to do wasn’t that bad. I’m planning on writing a blog soon about how I got Jinn Nation ready for publication – how I formatted it and how I got it onto Amazon and Smashwords; so keep an eye out if you’re interested in doing this for yourself. There may also be a future blog about marketing, although that’s something I’m still in the process of doing myself!

So go buy, read, tell me what you think. For a limited time, Jinn Nation will be at the very special price of £0.95 / $0.99, bargain!

The Jinn Are Coming…

Finally, I have a publication date for Jinn Nation! I’m officially setting it for a week’s time – Saturday 2 July, although you’ll probably be able to purchase the Amazon Kindle version a lot sooner. I’m planning to cover the other major ebook readers too, so don’t feel left out if you own a Nook or an iPad. It will also be available as a paperback in the very near future. So if you like novels about sadistic vampires with a vulnerable streak, unhinged psychics and beautiful goddesses with a penchant for megalomania, all set against a global stage, like my Facebook page or follow my Twitter feed to be among the first to know where and how to buy it. You can read an exclusive extract at my website.

Here’s the cover I’ve been so excited about:

This is so much better than anything I could have come up with on my own; I’m so glad that the rather excellent Andy Isaacs agreed to do it for me (my knowledge of graphic design is painfully limited).

As happens with most things I attempt to do within any sort of sensible timeframe, the publication date is a little later than I’d planned. Most days I’ve been working with the Sprogling firmly tucked into one elbow, leaving me with only one hand to type with. I love that she’s a cuddly baby, but the fact that she usually hates to be put down for any length of time does make life interesting. Especially if you desperately need to do the housework or take a shower. She’s also started to smile properly now (she’s 9 weeks old today), so obviously every time she does it, all work has to stop while I marvel at how gorgeous she is.

Proof! (or just an excuse to show off more pictures of my newborn, you decide).

I’ve just realised that I’ve laid all the blame for my own slackness on my child. Shameful. Well, my next project shouldn’t take me so long to finish. I’ve just reacquired the rights to my first novel, Dunraven Road, and I’m planning on republishing it with a shiny new cover and bonus material in the very near future. After that I’ll be continuing to write my new novel – one-handed no less, with a smiling Sprogling curled against my arm

The New Californian Gold Rush

I’m so happy to announce that my very first offering for the Amazon Kindle is now live on their site – mostly because formatting it took so bloody long.  It’s my zombie novella, The Undead Alliance.  

Want a blurb?

A new novella from the author of Dunraven Road.

He’s a stinking, undead, rotting carcass with unfortunate brain activity. She’s a human captive, kept alive so that her vital organs can one day help sustain her rotting zombie masters. Romeo and Juliet they ain’t.

Gabriel thought that waking up as a zombie was the end of the world. In fact, a new world was just beginning – a world of dark, creeping horror overseen by a decomposing eccentric in a pirate costume calling himself Captain James.

Five short years later and the dead have risen up to claim the UK. Gabriel finds himself in charge of the North Sector Harvesting Plant, watching the daily influx of the living with a weary eye. Having become increasingly disillusioned with The Undead Alliance and its practices, the arrival of the very human Daisy seems to be his salvation – but who would ever love a zombie? If he wants to convince her he’s more than just the sum of his maggot infested parts, he’ll have to break her out of the harvesting plant and defy everything the Alliance stands for. All of which is easier said than done, especially when he has to deal with the unwanted attentions of Princess – the icy paramour of Captain James himself.

Is Gabriel strong enough to turn against his charismatic yet ultimately evil leader? Or will he watch Daisy die?

I’m getting ahead of myself though, perhaps I should explain how I came to the decision to self-publish (which will henceforth be known as indie publishing, because it sounds sooo much cooler)…

For those of you who’ve been listening to my radio show, you’ll know I’ve been talking about e-publishing and the Kindle in particular, especially since Amazon recorded astronomical Kindle sales over the Christmas period. So many sales in fact, that at one point the Kindle was outselling the latest Harry Potter book. I’ve always been interested in digital publishing, although back in 2008 I was lamenting the fact that “In the early days… ebooks also suffered from the same snobbery used to demean print-on-demand services. If you had to resort to publishing through an ebook publisher, your book wasn’t worth jack.” Well, I think I can safely say that things have now changed. The Kindle and other major ebook readers such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook steadily grew in popularity over the course of last year, meaning of course that ebooks did too – particularly those published by indie authors who unlike the traditional publishers were putting out their work at a decent price. Paranormal romance author and indie publishing’s current heroine Amanda Hocking has sold over 185, 000 books since April 2010. E-publishing has suddenly become interesting.

Now, of course you’ll always be able to find self-published novels of the same calibre as some of the drek that often stinks up the place over at Lulu; but authors such as J.A. Konrath and H.P. Mallory are proof that this is no longer the norm. J.A. Konrath in particular propounds upon the benefits of hiring professional book designers and cover artists. It seems there really is nothing a traditional publisher can do that an author can’t do for themselves. Social networking even makes promotion easier (and cheaper), often bypassing the need for the sort of large scale advertising campaigns employed by the traditional print publishers (campaigns which have become infrequent to non-existent in recent years anyway, giving new authors about as much support as a cheap sports bra).

Perhaps what has really spurred me on to try my hand at indie publishing though is the amount of control you retain; not only over the content of your work, but over the royalties you can accrue. Many authors claim they’re not indie publishing simply because the traditional publishers rejected them, they’re indie publishing because they get a better deal. All of which is starting to make the traditional publishers and agents sweat into their designer suits.

In the wise words of J.A. Konrath:

“This is the California Gold Rush of 1849. Will everyone get rich? No. But damn near everyone who tries will make more money than they would if they try the traditional publishing route.”

Why wouldn’t you mark out a spot and start sifting for gold?

So, The Undead Alliance is my trial run. I’m planning to do similar things with my latest novel, Jinn Nation and I’m excited

Busy Frozen Bee

Happy new year, everyone I’m still here, I’ve just been in hiding – keeping warm against the currently near-arctic UK temperatures and busy writing new articles for Suite101. I signed up as a contributing writer in October and as my trial period is nearly up, I have to make sure I’ve uploaded at least ten articles or I get kicked off the team (eek!) Hence, these delights are now hot off the press and ready for your perusal:

Why E-Readers Will Change the Way You Buy Books – How Can Authors Combat E-Book Piracy?

Etsy – A Homemade Success Story

Knitted Toys – A Modern Phenomenon

Notice how I’ve managed to combine my two passions, writing and knitting? That’s the nice thing about Suite101 though, you really can write about anything you like (as long as it’s properly formatted, correctly cited and the pictures you include have commercial reuse rights… their Learning Hub section is more detailed than most car manuals). Plus, I’ve already made 19 cents in ad revenue, woo hoo, we’re eating steak tonight! (or maybe not…)

Here’s something completely unrelated… While I was researching the phenomenon of writers offering their novels for free online, I came across a new writer (new for me, anyway, the woman in question has sold about a million short stories and won about two million awards, I was just late to the party) who seems so awesome I thought I should mention her. As well as being a poet and short story writer, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of nine novels, two of which are available online. The Ice Puzzle can be read for a $10 subscription fee and a young adult novel reminiscent of Lewis Carroll called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making is offered on an intriguing “read for free and pay what you think it’s worth basis”. If you like highly original, well written fantasy, I strongly suggest you have a looksie.

Now, please excuse me while I head off to knit some sort of blanket to roll myself in, ready for the 20 centimetres of snow that’s been predicted to fall across Devon tomorrow. Oh joy.