Easy Q for Kindle Direct Publishing

Cafe Society
1

I am beginning the task of reading through the instructions to prepare a Word document for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The instructions seem pretty simple, but sometime too simple. For example, the instructions say to insert a page break between chapters (among other places). But, what kind of page break is this, exactly? And, what should I set my margins to?

FYI: Presently, in Word, I have Section Break “Next Page” breaks between chapters. And, the first page of each chapter has a top margin of 3.67-in with 1-in margins all around. All other pages are 1-in margins all around. Let me start here. Soon enough, I will have follow-up questions.

2

Format your document so you like the look of it. It’s been about a year since I put anything on KDP, but Amazon used to be pretty good about paying attention to your formatting, and preserving it as far as possible. You can download the book to have a look at it as many times as you need before you hit publish.

Having said that … if you want your book to look “right” without busting your ass and getting very upset, just upload your Word document–with minimal formatting, basically just Headings for your chapter titles–to draft2digital.com and download the .mobi from them, then upload that to Amazon. They have all the “shoulds” figured out, for how to format books.

3

That’s exactly the right thing to do.

That might or might not work.

However, if you go into Word, paragraph options, and increase “spacing” “before” and “after” that will result in wider vertical spacing. (Hitting the return key several times will not produce vertical spacing. It’s an HTML thing.)

4

Thanks for the tips. I’ll try your suggestions and play around with it to assure everything views correctly.

5

Just note that there is a difference between a page break and a section break. So if they really want just a page break, that might *not *be the right thing to do.

There are at least two ways to create a page break:

[ul]
[li]Keyboard: press CTRL + Enter[/li][li]Menu: select Page Layout > Breaks > Page Breaks > Page[/li][/ul]

6

True…but one of the options for Section Break is “Next Page,” and that’s the one to use.

Page break also works…but it won’t create the next section, which is important if you’re creating a table of contents.

(Also, for a Kindle e-book, set the ToC to not use page numbers.)