WALTER'S BLOG

E BOOKS PART THREE

The biggest problem with uploading the book on Amazon--or any e-reader--is formatting. The industry is new, and the desired formatting changes by the month. Two years ago they wouldn’t accept smart quotes. They do today. For formatting you must remember that the pilcrow is your friend. The pilcrow is that backward P in the middle of the Microsoft Word ribbon. It shows you the formatting in your manuscript, such as spaces between sentences, page breaks, and use of both the tab and enter key.

THINGS TO AVOID

Tabs are a big no-no. To get rid of them use Find and Replace. Select More at the bottom left, then select Special, and then Tab. The symbol for tab will be shown in Find. Put nothing in Replace and chose Replace all.

Another area to look at is the number of spaces between sentences. Many of us were trained to use two spaces between sentences. Nowadays they want just one. Again find and replace will help. Go to the find field, hit the space bar twice. Then using the mouse, go to the replace field and hit the space bar once. You won’t see anything, but the computer will know what to do.

By using paragraph from the center of the ribbon you can change the indent from five to two or three. I would not recommend more than three. The e-readers allow the reader to change font size and on some of the larger fonts you will find that five spaces take you half way across the screen.

When all else fails

The best and most up to date help in formatting will be contained in the free books available on Kindle. Publishing on Kindle with Kindle Direst Publishing and Smashword Style Guide By Mark Coker are both free and can be downloaded to the computer from the Kindle store. You do not need a Kindle, However make sure those books are current. Anything published two years ago is of little use.

THIS IS A REQUIREMENT, NOT A SUGGESTION!

Studying the books are a must! This is why you need to install Kindle on your computer. You need these free books. Little things will be mentioned like, no strange fonts and no fonts larger than 19. No page numbers or headers and footers are to be used, page breaks and the number of space before each chapter number/ Also how to use an index.

MORE NEXT WEEK