4 Ways of Formatting Your Book Text for the Kindle Format.

In order for your book to appear properly across the ever-growing versions of Kindle devices, it's absolutely crucial that you format things correctly while you are writing and once you have completed the writing process.

Getting the formatting right, as easily as possible will potentially save you a lot of headache and drama further down the road. The goal is to have your raw document so Kindle ready that translating it over to the Kindle format is simple and painless and it appears on the Kindle devices precisely as you envisioned it.

This isn’t as complicated or as taxing as you may think. I have covered the main formatting points to follow below, which will get your work Kindle format ready so you can get your literary masterpiece in order the world as quickly as possible.

1. Pre Format Your Document

The absolute best way to give yourself the fewest formatting related headaches is to pre-format your document before you start writing. This is really simple in a word processor like Microsoft Word which a large number of authors use to write their books.

You can set up pre formatting on Word by using the “Styles & Formatting” options. Of course, pre formatting is only relevant for those that haven’t started writing their masterpiece yet.

2. Set Up Headings Properly.

In order for headings and subheadings to function properly in your final Kindle book, you need to set them up properly on Word or whichever word processor you are using. We will use the example of Word as it’s by far the most common software authors use.

So, in Word, the correct way is as follows; chapter titles should use “Heading 1”, section titles should use “Heading 2” and subsection titles should use “Heading 3”

3. Set Up Paragraph Indents.

Using paragraph indents provides a much superior reading experience. A lot of authors put in paragraph indents manually for their entire book, which is incredibly laborious and time-consuming. But there’s a much better way, a way of doing the paragraph indents for your entire book in one go.

You do this in Word by going to the “Styles and Formatting” menu, and in the “indentation menu” selecting “special” and then selecting “first line” from the drop-down menu and from there selecting by how many inches or centimeters you would like the indent to be. Doing this once will do the indents for your entire book in one, whether that is 100 pages or 10,000.

Admittedly the option is a little tricky to find and may take a minute, but you will literally be saving yourself hours, so it’s worth it.

4. Choose Your Font.

Choosing your font is important but don’t get too carried away. Remember, your main priority is legibility and functionality when it comes to a font, as the book is going to be viewed across any number of Kindle devices as well as tablets, computers and laptops.

We highly recommend the font “Ariel”. And, if you really want to try something different then Courier, Lucida and Georgia are also strong options.