How to Create an Amazon Kindle Document

Amazon Kindle is Amazon's e-book reader. Amazon allows anyone to publish their books for the Kindle using their Digital Text Platform. While Amazon does allow you to upload both Word and HTML, the file type used for Kindle works is HTML. If you upload Word, Amazon will convert for you. It's easy to upload a file with Amazon's Digital Text Platform, but if you want to control the final output, there are a few tricks you should know.

Things You'll Need

• Digital Text Platform account
• Microsoft Word

Instructions

1. Open the Word document you wish to prepare as a Kindle document. You can upload this file as is and let Amazon's Digital Text Platform (DTP) convert the file to HTML for you, but you risk a formatting mess. It's best to make a few changes first.

2. Remove any embedded graphics, blank pages or headers and footers. This includes page numbers. Amazon will reformat the page numbers once your book is converted. Be sure to insert a title page that includes the title of the book and copyright information. Stick with a simple font--one that is HTML friendly, like Times New Roman, Arial or Georgia. Fancy fonts won't show up.

3. Clean up any styles in your manuscript. Styles, such as headings and body text should be consistent throughout the document. All body text should be formatted as body text. If your chapter headings use a "heading 1" style, make sure all of them use it. This will prevent mismatched styles from appearing in your manuscript.

4. Set your page margins to one inch all the way around and set your line spacing at 1.5 inches. Double space takes up too much screen space on an e-book reader. Set your font size at 10 or 11 points. Ensure you have page breaks between chapter rather than section breaks. Get rid of extra carriage returns as well. These will cause formatting headaches in your final manuscript.

5. Save your cleaned up file as HTML and upload it through your DTP account. Amazon's DTP program will now have less converting to do and you will have a polished manuscript for your Kindle book.

References

• Thinkydink.com "How to Use Amazon DTP"