Modupe Taiwo shared a link.

September 15 at 1:44pm

Format your Manuscript for Amazon with these Tools

Book formatting and text layout, especially for ebooks, though sounds simple and
look simple to do can be tricky. Manuscripts with 50 pages or less with no need for
special styling can easily be converted to PDF and uploaded to Amazon.

When your manuscript has lots of pages, images and graphics, special characters,
different styles and fonts applied to some texts especially quotes, and in some
instances in Christian literature where quoted Bible passages whose styling must be
different from other texts, simply converting to PDF may not work.

In most cases when such ebooks are previewed on Amazon previewer before publishing
(which you should always do), they become distorted and are not well positioned,
especially graphics. Bear in mind that PDF ( Portable Document Format) is a fixed
layout for ebooks and is not intended for ebook readers like Kindle and Nook. Pdf
does not have the ability to flow according to the settings of the electronic
reader or device.

For instance, you can increase or decrease font sizes of ebooks in Kindle. That
cannot be done with a PDF file which is why Amazon first converts the PDF you
upload to Mobi, their ebook format. During the conversion process, image
positioning and styling, even your font changes. Mind you, not all fonts translate
well in electronic readers.

To help authors overcome this formatting issues, Amazon has a solution which many
don�t know about. It created two tools to help with book formatting, they are

1. Kindle Create
2. Kindle Create Add in for Microsoft Word

I used the Kindle Create software but I didn�t like the output I got with it. But
the Kindle Create Add in for Microsoft is different and better in my opinion. It is
easy and simple to use. Once you run the software it adds a new tab to your already
existing Microsoft Office Word Document. It comes with templates for all the parts
of a book: front matter, body and back matter. For instance, there is a template
for book title page, dedication page, table of contents page etc. It also has a
Previewer which will show you how your ebook will look in different devices:
Kindle, Phone and Tablets. So it is just a matter of typing into the formatted
pages or copying and pasting from another document into that formatted page.

It is this formatted document that you will now upload to Amazon, and will be
converted to their Mobi format. You can download both from here:
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/AIEDQZJ8TVWZX