Making An E-book is Not as Hard as it Seems

January 2, 2013

Filed under The Life of Winter
Tags: amazon kindle, Book, Books, Carmindi, E-book, Formatting, HD, Help, How To, Kindle, Preview, scrivener, Simple, Winter

2 responses

Yesterday, I began to help a friend of my with formatting their e-book for Amazon Kindle. First, I put my project in Scrivener. My awesome word processer.

Then, to test how it worked, clicked on the Compile button up on the tool bar. Soon the program was telling me I needed Kindle Previewer on my Mac to look at the formatting. (For those who have 10.5, you may need to update your system.)

I got it downloaded and Compiled my ‘Test Novel’ into .mobi format and soon had it open in the Kindle Previewer.

In the Kindle Previewer, you can choose what type of Kindle you want to test it on. From the Plain Kindle to Kindle Fire HD. (Wow!)

Then you can go back to your Scrivener and begin tweaking your book. (Before you embark on E-book making, remember to edit! Statistics says a better edited book is most successful!) You also want to go page by page on the Kindle Previewer and make sure the ends of the pages stop where you want. So you don’t have a weird tagged on word at the end of the page.

~.~.~

But before you go all of this trouble of Compiling on Scrivener, you want to make sure that your book is divided into folders. One folder for Each Chapter.

And in each folder, one scene. (< This is the simple way I got my ‘Test Novel’ Formatted. You can put written page breaks in the body of text.)

It should look like this when you click just the Chapter Folder:

Chapter One (Or title)

- Page Break Here-

Once upon a time, there lived a giant spoon who ran off with the shaggy rug to go on an adventure to find the Vacuum cleaner.

When you go export, you click ‘Include’ on the Chapter Folder AND Scene. And I suggest you also click ‘As Is’.

This may take a little playing around to get the Table of Contents correct.

Hopefully this will give yo a basic looking book that will look okay on Kindle. Today I am going to the library to find more books on how to format and export e-books. I still need to learn how to put pictures in the text and such.  I will be sure to share what I have learned later today or early tomorrow.

Cheers,

Winter

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