Step-by-by step Kindle ebook HTML formatting instructions

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UPDATE!!! (Jan 6, 2010)

I have just published these instructions in a new Kindle eBook:  Format Your eBook for Kindle in One Hour - A Step-by-Step Guide. It's only $2.99!! I've updated the instructions to be easier and hopefully quicker. Plus, it's only $2.99! If you found these instructions helpful, please consider buying the ebook to help support this blog. Thanks!
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Some other aspiring Kindle authors have asked about formatting their books for Kindle. They’ve wondered whether they should pay a professional service to do it, or do it themselves. They lamented that Amazon’s conversion tool doesn’t do exactly what they want – such as extra line breaks, page breaks, starting chapters further down the page, and so on.

In this post I will give you step-by-step instructions on how to format your Kindle book.

For anyone with HTML coding experience, this is really easy. For those of you without HTML coding experience, I provide my own Kindle ebook HTML template file, which you can start from. You just need to replace some stuff in it.

I don’t do anything fancy in these instructions. No additional images, no cross-linking other than the Table of Contents, no enhanced content. If this post is popular and I get many requests, I may provide similar instructions for other, more complicated formatting.

It took me about an hour to manually format my ebook into a Kindle format.

I am using my first ebook, Dead Dwarves, Dirty Deeds, as the basis for these instructions. If you want your ebook to be formatted simply and cleanly like my ebook, then you can follow these steps.

It might be helpful if you buy the Dead Dwarves, Dirty Deeds ebook and review it while you are reading these instructions. It is available on Amazon for $0.99. It is NOT required to use these instructions.

(But, if these instructions are helpful to you, you can thank me by buying the ebook.)

Since most people probably have Word, I’ll explain how to format your ebook using Word 2007 and a simple text editor (like Notepad). You can also use more advanced text editors, such as Microsoft Expression Web 2.

And, off we go…

1. Create a new folder on your computer, such as YourBookTitle.
2. Save your book file in the YourBookTitle folder.
3. Save your cover art file in YourBookTitle folder. Remember to comply with Amazon guidelines on your cover art.
4. Save the following HTML file to the YourBookTitle folder: YourBookTitle.html. To save this file, right-click on the link and then click Save Target As. This will open the Save As dialog box and you can save the file.
5. Rename the YourBookTitle.html file to whatever the title of your book is, such as DeadDwarvesDirtyDeeds.html. I will continue to refer to this file as YourBookTitle.html, though, so you don't get confused.
6. Open the YourBookTitle.html file in Notepad or some other text editor or HTML code editor.
7. The template file has all the formatting code already coded into it. You only need to replace some temporary placeholder text with the specifics for your ebook. For each item in the following table, locate the Placeholder text with the appropriate text for your ebook.
   

   Find this placeholder text in the HTML file	And replace it with this
   YourBookTitle	The title of your book, such as Dead Dwarves Dirty Deeds. This appears 2 times in the template file.
   YourCover	The filename of your cover art, such as Deeds. You might also need to change the format extension from .jpg to whatever format you are using.
   YourName	Your name, the author of the book, such as Derek J. Canyon This appears 3 times in the template file.
   YourWebSite	Your website URL, such as www.derekjcanyon.com This appears 2 times in the template file.
   YourCoverArtistWebsite	The website of your cover artist, such as www.coverartist.com This appears 2 times in the template file.
   YourEditor	The name of your editor, such as Joel Palmer
   YourEditorEmail	Your editor’s email address, such as editor@editor.com
   Chapter001	The code identifier for your chapters. Change the number for each chapter.

8. Save the HTML file.
9. If you don’t want to have a Table of Contents, delete everything between the START_TABLE_OF_CONTENTS and END_TABLE_OF_CONTENTS lines.
10. If you DO want a Table of Contents, you’ll need to add entries for each of your chapters. I’ve only included entries for the first three chapters. For each additional chapter, replicate the existing chapter code lines and change the chapter numbers. Such as:
    <p align="center"><a href="#Chapter004">Chapter 4</a></p>
    <p align="center"><a href="#Chapter005">Chapter 5</a></p>
    <p align="center"><a href="#Chapter006">Chapter 6</a></p>
    And so on...
11. If you want to change the text that shows up for each chapter in the Table of Contents, replace the “Chapter 4” with your new text, such as:

    Old: <p align="center"><a href="#Chapter004">Chapter 4</a></p>

    New: <p align="center"><a href="#Chapter004">A Short Cut to Mushrooms</a></p>
12. If you do change your chapter titles in the Table of Contents, remember to do the same at the beginning of each chapter of the story, such as:
    Old: <h2>Chapter 4</h2>
    New: <h2>A Short Cut to Mushrooms</h2>
13. Save the HTML file.
14. Open your book in Word.
15. Remove the Word headers and footers.
16. Delete the cover page, title page, copyright page, and all other pages that are not actual pages of the story. You need to start with a clean file of just paragraphs and chapter headings.
17. Click Replace.
18. In the Find and Replace dialog box, in the Find What box, type the following: ^p
19. In the Replace with box, type the following: </p>^p<p>
20. Click Replace All. This will add the required HTML tags around your Word paragraphs.
21. Notice that the first paragraph does not have a starting <p> tag. You must type that in now.
22. Each paragraph must have a <p> at the beginning and a </p> at the end. Go through your story now and make sure this is the case.
23. If you had blank lines in your story these will now show up as <p></p>. To clean up your HTML, you can replace <p></p> with <br />, if you want. The <br /> tag adds one line break, so if you want an empty space between two paragraphs, you’ll need to add two line breaks: <br /><br />
24. Check the very last line of your story. There is probably a lonely <p> tag there at the end. Delete it.
25. If you have any chapter headings, you’ll need to change each of your chapter titles from <p>Chapter title</p> to be the same as the content between the START_CHAPTER_1_HEADING line and the END_CHAPTER_1_HEADING line.  Of course, you'll have to change the relevant parts for each chapter.
26. Copy everything in the book Word file (you can use Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-C).
27. Go to the HTML file, put the cursor after the <!-- PASTE YOUR STORY CONTENT AFTER THIS LINE--> line, and then press Ctrl-V on your keyboard to paste your book content into the HTML file.
28. Save the HTML file.
29. You are now done formatting your book for Kindle.
30. However, now you have to compress it into a zip file. This is pretty easy.
31. In Windows Explorer, select the HTML file and the cover art file.
32. Right-click on the HTML file, point to Send to, and then click Compressed (zipped) folder.
33. Your book is ready to be submitted on your Amazon Digital Text Platform Bookshelf.

If you have any questions, use the comments below.