It
includes the following improvements from the previous version:
Compatible
with my upcoming guide, Format Your eBook for Nook in Four Hours. You can clean
up and tag your novel in Word, then use that Word file in both the Kindle
process and the Nook process. It will save you some time this way if you want
to publish on both devices.
Italics,
bold, and underlined text support. Instructions on how to do a global find and
replace to add appropriate code to all italics, bold, or underlined text in
your novel. It's now easy to convert such text to the code required by Kindle!
Template
code for cover page, title page, table of contents, dedication page, chapter
title pages, acknowledgments page, about the author page, and books by the author
page.
Here's
what the formatting of your enovel will look like after using this guidebook:
Chapter
1: Do not buy this book if...
Chapter
2: Why you should buy this book
Chapter
3: Introduction
Chapter
4: Why are there other editions of this guide?
Chapter
5: Isn’t this book the same as Derek’s other formatting book?
Chapter
6: Why not just sell both sets of instructions in one guidebook?
Chapter
7: Contacting Derek
Chapter
8: What your book will look like
Chapter
9: How long will this really take?
Chapter
10: Tools and files you’ll need
Chapter
11: What else you’ll need – patience!
Chapter
12: Instructions and conventions
Chapter
13: Overview of the entire process
Chapter
14: Show file extensions in Windows Explorer
Chapter
15: Download the template HTML file
Chapter
16: Save your novel files to the working folder
Chapter
17: Replace the placeholder text in the template
Chapter
18: Include a dedication page (or not)
Chapter
19: Include a clickable table of contents (or not)
Chapter
20: Overview of cleaning up your Word document
Chapter
21: Delete the front matter from your Word document
Chapter
22: Remove double spaces from your Word document
Chapter
23: Remove blank lines from your Word document
Chapter
24: Clean up italics leaking between paragraphs
Chapter
25: Clean up bold text leaking between paragraphs
Chapter
26: Clean up underlined text leaking between paragraphs
Chapter
27: Overview of replacing Word formatting with code tags
Chapter
28: Replace the & (ampersand) character with XML code
Chapter
29: Replace greater than and less than characters with code in your Word
document
Chapter
30: Add paragraph tags to your Word document
Chapter
31: Fix problems with bulleted lists
Chapter
32: Fix problems with numbered lists
Chapter
33: Tell Word to use straight quotes instead of curly quotes
Chapter
34: Fix lonely paragraph close tags in your Word document
Chapter
35: Delete extra paragraph tags from your Word document
Chapter
36: Add code for centered paragraphs
Chapter
37: Optional: Add carriage returns
Chapter
38: Add tags for all the italic text
Chapter
39: Add tags for all the bold text
Chapter
40: Add tags for all the underlined text
Chapter
41: Replace other special characters with code
Chapter
42: Optional: Add more images to your novel
Chapter
43: Tell Word to go back to using curly quotes
Chapter
44: Done editing the Word doc
Chapter
45: Copy chapters from Word document into the HTML file
Chapter
46: Replace chapter titles with formatted chapter titles
Chapter
47: Paste your acknowledgements into the HTML file
Chapter
48: Paste the about the author section into the HTML file
Chapter
49: Edit the Books By This Author page
Chapter
50: Optional: Add page breaks
Chapter
51: Done formatting your ebook!
Chapter
52: Compress your book files into a zip format for upload to Kindle KDP
Appendix
A: Efficiency shortcuts in Windows
Appendix
B: Efficiency shortcuts in Word
Appendix
C: Troubleshooting
Appendix
D: Kindle formatting resources
Before
buying the new guidebook, you might want to consider the following reasons NOT
to buy it:
·
Do
not buy this book if you are happy with the automated conversion provide by the
Kindle Direct Publishing site. If you like the results you get from the
conversion tools, you don’t need this book. I found that the conversion tools
resulted in some strange formatting behavior with page breaks and line breaks,
among other things, which is why I prefer to use the method explained in this
book.
·
Do
not buy this book if you already own Format Your eBook for Kindle in One Hour
2011 Edition. If your copy of the book does not indicate an edition, then you
have the 2011 edition. The 2011 edition still works, but the 2012 edition has
instructions on a few more things, and is compatible with my other book Format
Your eBook for Nook in Four Hours. So, if you're happy with the 2011 edition
and don't want to worry about Nook, then don't buy this book. If you want to
put your book on both Kindle and Nook, then you should get this book and the
Nook book.
·
Do
not buy this book if you want a comprehensive explanation of Kindle formatting.
This book is a precise, non-comprehensive step-by-step guide to format
your ebook for Nook in ONE way. This book does not tell you every detail
of Kindle formatting, nor does it explain why things are done. This is not a
classroom textbook. This is a rigid method for formatting your ebook in ONE
way. If you pay attention and know a bit about coding, you could figure out
additional options, but that is not the purpose of this book. The purpose of
this book is to get your ebook formatted as quickly as possible with very few
decisions to make on your part.
·
Do
not buy this book if you don’t want your future ebook to be formatted like my
novel The Elemental Odyssey. I used
these instructions to format that novel. So, go download a free sample from Amazon
and see if you like the page, paragraph, and text formatting enough to have
your book look the same. If you don’t, then don’t buy this book.
·
Do
not buy this book if your novel has tables or lots of lists. This book explains how to format novels with
basic text (including normal, italics, bold, and underlined). This guide also
tells you how to format numbered and bulleted lists, but it is a laborious
process, so if you have lots of lists it’s probably not a good idea to use this
guide. This guide does not include instructions on how to format tables.
·
Do
not buy this book if you only use Mac. This book does not explain how to do
anything on the Apple Mac or any other operating system besides Windows. If you
only have a Mac, do not buy this book. I’m a PC user, and so this book does not
support Mac. If you don’t feel comfortable self-converting these instructions
from PC to Mac, do not buy this book.
·
Do
not buy this book if you are not comfortable using Microsoft Word. These
instructions assume you are using Word. If you aren’t, you’ll need to know how
to do the same things in your word processor.
·
Do
not buy this book if you are not comfortable renaming, copying, and moving
files in Windows Explorer.
·
Do
not buy this book if you are not comfortable doing Find and Replace in a text
editor (such as Notepad or Microsoft Expression).
·
Do
not buy this book if you can’t follow step-by-step instructions, in order.
·
Do
not buy this book if you are easily frustrated by complicated, boring work.
Manually formatting your book is a chore. If you put a quotation mark in the
wrong place, it could mess things up. If you are easily frustrated by
computers, coding, debugging, or boring repetitive formatting tasks, do not buy
this book. Instead, you should use the conversion tools or hire a professional
to do the work.
·
Do
not buy this book if you only want to upload your book to your own personal Kindle.
This book tells you how to publish your book to Kindle for other people to buy
from the Amazon website. If you just want to upload your book to your own Kindle,
you don’t need this book. Check your Kindle user’s guide to learn what is
possible.
Does the old edition still work?
Yes, the 2011 edition of the guide still works. So, if you like it, you don't need to buy the new edition. But, you get a lot of new options in the new edition, so you might like it better.
If your copy of the guide doesn't indicate what edition it is, then it is the 2011 edition.
PS:
Format Your eBook for Nook in Four Hours will hopefully be published within a
few weeks. It will be available at an introductory price of $6.99, because it was so difficult to write. ;)
