Last week, we talked about selling on Kindle and I promised to talk about formatting your Kindle ebooks. If you’ve got pre-formatted documents, you might be disheartened to know that Kindle is pretty darned picky with what you upload. But of course, there’s a reason for that. They want to make sure that all the ebooks they sell are consistently formatted and that they can be viewed properly in Kindle devices.
So, with that in mind, let’s talk about what you need to know about formatting. Here are the basics:
- Kindle recommends creating your documents in .doc format, but you can find other other acceptable formats here.
- You can use indentations, italics and headings.
- You cannot use bullet points (ACK! I love bullet points), headers and footers.
- Add a page break at every chapter.
- You can insert images, but they can’t be pasted into your document. You have to use the “insert image” feature of your word processor and they have to be in JPEG format. Plus, they need to be center aligned.
- When it comes to items at the front of your book like your title, copyright, dedication, preface and prologue, they need to be added in the order listed here. Plus, you need to have a page break between each one.
- You can also create an active table of contents, but read through the guidelines as you can’t use page numbers since they don’t apply to Kindle devices. More details are here.
- When everything is ready, save your document in “Web Page, Filtered” format for best results. You can load a .doc or even a .pdf, but there may be issues with the final formatting, so Kindle doesn’t recommend it.
Here’s how to save as Web Page, Filtered:
Of course, there are other fine details that may apply and you should read the full formatting guidelines here.
Download a Template
Thanks to my VA, Mel (who is also my new business partner at APLC), to provide a template I could share with you and she kindly obliged. While this template doesn’t cover every little detail about Kindle formatting, it can serve as a workable guideline for you to put your documents together.
Download it here (zip folder)
