Formatting for Kindle?

[Legendary Sidekick]

I'm finally getting off my butt and writing a short story with the intent to have something I can sell this year if not summer.

Before I go too far, and end up having to go reformat my file in a Kindle-friendly way, any tips? Example, if I write in a Pages document with the intent to post here, I have to hit enter between paragraphs so I don't end up with a wall of text.

For Kindle, I'm assuming I DON'T do that. I did actually publish to Kindle in 2009, but I remember hating it... especially when I included poetry which needs line-breaks and stanza-breaks to be distinguishable like this:


Roses are red
Violets are blue
There's a space between stanzas here
I hope the space shows up on Kindle too

Here's the second stanza
Which doesn't have any rhyme or rhythm
Because this is just an example of spacing
And frankly I think it's already so long I've distracted readers from my point


So... if I have my bard character introduce a story with poem/song, will the spacing come out right if I [shift+enter] between lines and [enter] at the end of each stanza? That's what I did three years ago, which I guess worked. (This works in a Pages document if, for example, formatting is set to "12 pt space after paragraph".)



EDIT - And what about tabs? Is there any way to move the text further to the right? (I don't mean paragraph indents.) If not, I won't attempt it on my own file either. I'm just wondering what my Kindle-friendly options are.

 

[yachtcaptcolby]

I imported a PDF of my novel into MobiPocket Creator for turning it into the proper file type for Amazon. It'll also directly convert Word documents, but you need to have Word installed for it to do its thing (which means exporting to .doc from Pages or OpenOffice won't cut it).

Anyway, the converter worked reasonably well. The HTML it created was a little flaky, so I had to do some basic cleanup. Your best bet for making your eBook look exactly the way you want is to either brush up on your HTML and CSS skills or enlist the help of someone who knows that stuff well.

 

[Steerpike]

I found the easiest way to format for Kindle was to put the text in Word, save as a filtered HTML document, then open in a text editor to easily strip out extraneous HTML tags. You may have to add a bit of HTML in for things like cover image (if any), pages breaks where you want them, and so on, but it is a fairly straightforward process.

 

[Robert Donnell]

There is a free book from Kindle that covers all of that.