Review: Something worth downloading!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 23, 2012
Building your book for Kindle is an extremely comprehensive and well detailed way in which you can format your book for sales on Amazon. In fact, it takes me anywhere between 20 to 30 minutes to format a book. And that is going slow and snail like! I really liked the screenshots, which helped me where there were no instructions.Here are some other formatting tips, which I use to format my e-books. Writers are going to find them useful.Save a copy. So Book A, save as Book A Formatted. That way, if something goes horribly wrong, you still have the old, pre-formatted book.This is for word 2007. Under View, set it to Draft and press the show all button. This is going to help in spacing.Select the entire document with ctrl + a. Change the font to Times New Roman. Don't care what your personal favorite font is. Just need the document uniform, and a standard font. TNR does the trick. While you're doing this, go ahead and set the font size to 12.While everything is currently still selected, right click -> paragraph. There's a couple things to do here. Under spacing, set `before' to 0 and `after' to 10 pt (do not leave them blank).  Set the spacing itself to Single. Hit ok.Still with whole document selected, go to your ruler up at the top (if you can't see it, go to the view tab up at the top and click the checkmark `ruler' to make it visible). You should see the little marker used for indents. Drag everything all the way to the left. Then, adjusting the top triangle only (the one for First Line Indent) drag it forward to .5 inches, which forms a nice first line indent on digital devices.Hit ctrl + f to open up the Find menu, then click the Replace tab. In the find tab, type ^t while in the replace tab, leave it blank. This will delete all the manual tabs (which you should never, ever use). Hit replace all.Clear the find tab, and type in ^l (that's a lower case L) in the find, and in the replace, ^p. This is going to format your paragraphs.I found this particularly useful, especially when there were plenty of spaces between the words showing up as double dots where a single dot should be.Clear the find tab, and then put in two spaces. In the replace section, hit the spacebar once. This will find any hidden sections where you accidentally hit the space bar twice while typing. Hit replace all. Hit replace all again.Next, in the find tab, type in " ." That's a space followed by a period (don't type the quotation marks, just using them to help show the spaces). In the replace, type just a period. Same idea, except for accidental gaps between words and the period at the end. Hit replace all.Some of you might have underlined instead of italicizing things. Well, we want them in italics now. So clear the find section, and with cursor within, hit ctrl + u. In the replace, again clear it out, put in the cursor, and hit ctrl + i. Hit replace all.Moving on to ellipses. In the find, type in "..." while in the replace, this is what I want you to do. With the cursor inside, hold down your alt key on your keyboard, and then on your number pad hit in order, 0133. Let go of the alt key. Hit replace all. Now in the find, go ahead and write "..." while leaving the ellipses alone in the replace. Hit replace all.10. Dashes, em dashes, all evil! Okay, in the find, type in "--". That's two regular dashes side by side. With cursor in the replace, hold the alt key and then on the number pad hit 0151. When you let go, you should have: - instead. Hit replace all.11. Still using the find/replace. We'll do two more here, both similar. First, in the find, type in " ^p", and in the replace, just "^p". Do this again with "^p ", leaving the replace part still as "^p". This will get rid of any spaces before or after paragraph breaks, which can jack up formatting on certain devices.Okay, go ahead and close the find and replace tool. We're moving on to the next (very) common problem. Do not, under any circumstances, try to form new pages by doing anything other than hitting ctrl + enter on your keyboard.All right, now start scrolling through your document, specifically going to each individual chapter break. If you see the evil line of P's, delete them, and use ctrl + enter to place in an actual page break.I am indebted to a good soul on the net who posted these instructions. I am passing them on. Three cheers for keyboard shortcuts!