![]() ![]() Your word processor enables you to use style sheets–use them. Readers do expect text to look a certain way, though, and you take a chance of distracting them from the prose if you mess with their expectations.įor those of you using anything other than html to format your ebooks, (pardon my shouting) NO TABS! Tabs, and using the space bar to indent paragraphs, play havoc with ebooks. It’s really a preference and not about right and wrong. Why the convention? Indented paragraphs are quicker to read (not really, but doesn’t it seem that way?), while block paragraphs tend to be weightier, denser, and can add a measure of gravitas to the text. Convention says, indented paragraphs for fiction and block style for non-fiction. The most basic of basic styles are indented and block paragraphs. Even if you don’t use fancy bits and curlicues, you can make your ebook look polished, professional and, yes, assertive–as in, “ I am a smart and sophisticated writer who knows what she is talking about, so pay attention!“–just by taking care with your paragraph styles. When you send your writing into the world you want it to look polished, professional, and assertive. See my books here: a reader is conscious or not of doing it, they are judging at least some of the quality of your writing by how it looks on the screen. More about me on Amazon’s author page: /author/aliyahmarr You may only link to this article, please don’t copy it to your blog or website. I have published eight books of my own using CreateSpace, Kindle, and LightningSource, and I have helped numerous other authors with their work.Ĭopyright 2015, Aliyah Marr, All rights reserved. I now have to get busy and fix all my books!Ībout me: I am a designer and author. I hope that this trick helps my fellow Kindle book publishers. Turn on the “reversed P” button on the top bar to “show all non-printing characters” on your page.Īnd here is the final result: a perfectly formatted Kindle book with the block paragraphs that I designed. You can then scan your document and see that before each new paragraph you have a line break indicated by the bent arrow. The line break “fools” the Kindle mashup machine to think that the paragraph begins at the empty first line, and forces the paragraph with the line break to really start at the line below it: officially the “second line.” (Double paragraph returns won’t work because Kindle will indent each one. The paragraph may indent the first line, but as this is blank, the indent is “white” and doesn’t show. You can see the line breaks follow the paragraph breaks in the document. If you need to put in a manual line break, it can be done by hitting the RETURN key while holding down the SHIFT key. The second window replaces the paragraph breaks with a paragraph break and a line break. (That’s a lower-case “L” with a “carrot” character preceding it to make a line break.) The first window is looking for paragraph breaks. STEP #5: Duplicate what I have in the above window: STEP #4: Click on the “Gear” icon in the middle and choose “Advanced Find & Replace.” STEP #3: Go to the advanced “Find/Replace” in Word. STEP #2: Duplicate your document and work off the dupe in case something happens. ![]() STEP #1: Clean up your document to remove multiple paragraph breaks! My last book, The Tarot Key is a really large manuscript, and I was facing a massive editing job to do this by hand, but there is a quick shortcut which I outline next. So, I place a paragraph break (shown as a “p” in the picture below) at the end of every paragraph and then follow it up with a line break (shown as a bent arrow below). Besides, I am a designer, and this tiny indent bothers me (designers can make themselves and everyone around them crazy). 01 indent to make a “nearly invisible” indent, but Kindle ignores this and gives you paragraph indents anyway. Point #7 is what I use for making Kindle show me true block paragraphs. Tables (they don’t really work, I prefer to use a picture of a table). Some “special characters,” but no lists or bullet points.Ħ. I use only 2 font sizes: 12 points for body, 14 points for headings, anything else is taken care of by using BOLD).ĥ. Font size (please don’t go crazy with this. No font choices (these are determined by device or user).ģ. Remember Kindle is basic HTML: HTML is tag coding, and in its most basic form, it has very few formatting options:Ģ. I have researched this and even followed the Smashwords guide, but my Kindle books always forced indents on my paragraphs and removed the paragraph breaks I had set in my Word doc. But I just discovered a new trick to force Kindle books to show a block paragraph instead. ![]()
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