Table of Contents, Kindle Create

To upload a book to Amazon KDP and publish it as an ebook, you could simply upload the Word doc already created in part 3. However, if your book has graphics (photos) or any kind of special formatting like lists or tables, it's worthwhile to use the KDP Kindle Create program to create a "standardized" KDP ebook. 

A guide to using KC can be found here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G7R2L7V5X6SJH948

Table of Contents

An ebook requires two kinds of Table of Contents. The first one is the page in the beginning of the ebook, and is made up of clickable links to each chapter heading. Place your cursor at the bottom of the title page. Go to the Layout tab, click Breaks and select Next Page. Then type "Table of Contents" and enter. Then click the References tab, and then on the far left "Table of Contents". Here there are several styles to choose from. You can also choose to create a "Custom" TOC (such as one without page numbers, or one using more than one level of chapter breaks (such as chapter sub-headings)).

The second TOC is the software-based one which a Kindle e-reader displays when a user clicks on the e-reader TOC icon. KC will automatically create this for your ebook, so that readers can move around the book by tapping in the e-reader's digital TOC. Actually, KC can also create the first TOC "page" described in the previous paragraph, but I prefer that one to be created in the Word doc so that it will be there when creating the paperback version of your book.

Here is the KDP page on creating a TOC: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201605700

Other sections you may want to create in your book include the Copyright page, a Dedication page, and/or a Preface. In each of these cases, DO NOT hit the Enter key repeatedly to create spaces above and below your content. It's much better to just add a Next Page after the end of each section. Repeated "hard return" Enter key strokes should be avoided if at all possible.

Kindle Create

Next, download and install KC using this page: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=GHU4YEWXQGNLU94T.

Start KC. Select "Create New" and then click on "Choose".

Next there are 2 choices on the left to click a "Reflowable" book or a "Print Replica" book. Unless your book is a childrens book with pictures, you will want to choose Reflowable. Then click "Choose File" to get to your Word doc. KC will then start importing your Word doc (this will take a couple minutes). When you get the popup "Import Successful" click "Continue". Then "Get Started". KC will then suggest chapters to include in its "digital TOC". You can accept these or reject them depending on whether or not you agree to their suggestions. 

Once past this step, a navigation column will appear on the left and your book text will be in the middle. In the navigation panel, yellow dots are suggested chapter titles for the digital TOC. Ones that are already included in the digital TOC are in black. If there are any headings you want to add to the digital TOC, click to the chapter heading and then on the right click "Chapter Title". However, you will most likely not need to do this if you already selected your chapter titles when importing to KC.

Now you can insert photos (or correct any that were already in your Word doc). Photos carried over from Word sometimes become corrupted. Look at each one. If a photo looks messed up, delete it and then Rt click where you want to re-insert the photo from your source. You can now experiment with the size of the image. "Full" will be the largest size.

At this point you will want to see how the book will look on a Kindle device. In the top right corner click Preview. With this function you can see how your book will look on different devices and in different fonts and font sizes. You can also try out the digital TOC by clicking the bottom right box.

If you would like to modify your book further, then you can play around with KC's editing functions. HOWEVER, these changes will only be for the Kindle ebook, and will obviously not reach back out to your original Word doc.  

Next, click "Publish" and follow the prompts to save if any appear. 

That's it. Now go to your KDP Bookshelf and upload your book.

More info on the above steps on Amazon's help page here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200645680

Paperback

To create a Paperback, Amazon's help starts here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834190. 

Windows users will be sent here:https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202145400. 

This page goes through the steps with many videos, but I found downloading the PDF instructions to be more useful (click "Download Instructions"). 

To create a paperback, you will essentially format your Word doc into a print book and then export it to a PDF doc. Then you upload your new PDF doc to your bookshelf. The trickiest part of this whole ordeal is the pagination and the headers/footers, especially if you want to have different page formats for the introduction and the book body, or if you want to leave out a page number on each chapter's first page. Who knows, that may be my next chapter, but the PDF instructions do a decent job of covering these steps. Just remember to de-link your headers and footers!

Assigning Styles to Paragraphs

This post goes into more detail about using Styles to define how parts of your book will look (fonts, sizes, tabs, etc). If you are only interested in creating an ebook, then this process is not really necessary, since Styles don't carry over very well in Kindle ebooks. However, if there's even a slight possibility that you will turn your book into a paperback (and really, I see no reason why you wouldn't - paperbacks look pretty cool on a bookshelf!) then you might want to read on.

Customizing Styles
As described in the last post, Styles are used to easily change the formatting of each element in your book (chapter titles, paragraphs, quotes, etc.). This is a very powerful tool, but also a very dangerous one, since you can effect the whole book with one click.

Let's first customize the chapter titles. Click on one of your chapter titles (ex. "Chapter 1"). In the Styles panel "Heading 1" will be highlighted. Rt-click and select "Modify" (lt-click). Now you can change the font and size of your headers. You will also probably want to change the color to black, instead of the default blue. Near the bottom of the panel click "Automatically update". This means that when you change the Style of a book element, it will change every occurrence in the entire book assigned with that same Style (in this case, all chapter titles will look the same). As an example, I will change the font in my "test" book to Century Gothic, font size 22, color black. Click OK. Boom, every chapter heading is changed to match.

At this point it may be a good idea to start playing with the spacing above and below book elements (like chapter headings). Click on a chapter title, right click on Header 1 and Modify again. At bottom left is a Format pull-down. The Format pull-down allows you to customize Styles in a much deeper way. Click Format and select Paragraph.

In the menu's 3rd section ("Spacing") you can add blank spaces before and after any kind of book element. Chapter titles look good when positioned part way down the page, so increase the "Before" number, for example to 200. In the "After" box put 60 so that there will be some space separating the chapter title from the first paragraph. At this point you can start playing around even more, using justification, italics, underlines, etc. Click OK when you are done.

(Also, note that in the last chapter we got rid of all blank lines in between body paragraphs. At this point it IS possible to add a small space in between paragraphs, which I see is done in some ebooks. To do this, for the Paragraph Style, add some spacing in the "After" box, as described above.)

The same procedure can be repeated to modify other pre-defined Styles. For example, the "Quote" style defaults to centered justification in my test document. I want it to be full justification. So I click on a quoted passage, go to the Home tab, rt-click on Quote, lt-click on Modify. Make sure Automatically Update is clicked on. Click the full justify button, OK, that's it.

Making a New Style

Next we will create a style called "Paragraph", which will be used to format all of the "normal" paragraphs in our book. Select the first paragraph in your book. If you get a popup menu, click on "Styles" and then "Create A New Style" (if no popup appears then rt-click to force it open). Then name the new Style "Paragraph". This new Paragraph style should then appear in the Styles panel. Now select all of the paragraphs in each chapter by clicking before the first letter, hold down Shift while paging down and lt-clicking at the end of your chapter text. Then click the Paragraph style from the panel. Repeat this for every chapter. 

Alternatively, Amazon's KDP help page (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200645680) actually suggests modifying the "Normal" Style instead of creating a new "Paragraph" Style (modifying an existing Style is described below). In this case it will not be necessary to change all of the body text to "Paragraph" Style. However, I don't like messing with the "Normal" Style since changes may accidentally carry over to other new documents...

Modifying a Style

At this point you can modify your Paragraph style, probably the single most dramatic thing you can do to a book, since you will change 99% of it in one click. Click inside a paragraph, select the Paragraph Style, rt-click to select Modify. Make sure Automatically Update is clicked on. In my book changed it to full justification and changed the font to Calibri. These choices are just quick examples - font science is a whole other ballgame. In general try not to get too fancy. For ebooks it doesn't matter so much since e-readers allow customize-able fonts, but in general sans-serif fonts are good for digital, and serif fonts are good for paperbacks.

At this point your book is practically ready to become an ebook if it's a fiction novel. If your book is non-fiction, it may need more elements like sub-headers, super-scripts for footnotes, special headers for list titles, etc. Just make a new Style as described above for each of these elements.

Paragraph First Line Indents
Although this will be a repeat exercise of what I just described above, it's worth going through this exercise, since everybody will probably need to do it. First, let's make the Paragraphs indented in their first sentence. Click on a paragraph, select the style, modify, pull down the Format button and select Paragraph (get used to this routine). In the resulting menu in the second section ("Indentation") click Special and select "First line". In the "By" section put in 0.2".

Now, the first paragraph in each chapter is usually not indented, so we have to create a new Style just to handle these first Paragraphs. Select the first paragraph in a chapter, from the popup menu click Styles, then Create a Style (if a popup menu doesn't appear, then rt-click on the selected paragraph). Create the new Style "1st Paragraph". Then Modify that Style by right clicking on its button in the Styles panel, navigate to the Format and Paragraph menu and then for Special choose None. As always, make sure "Automatically Update" is clicked on. Click OK. Then select each first paragraph in each chapter and assign it the "1st Paragraph" Style you just created.

Congratulations, the hard part is over. Now the fun begins. Start clicking on the Styles you have used in your book and start playing with fonts, font sizes, justification, etc. There is an art to choosing fonts but I would suggest looking at books in your own library and see what works by using those as your examples.

It may seem that this is alot of work just to do a little formatting, but trust me, when you later need to change all of your chapter titles to match your new paragraph font, this will be worth it.

Some of these steps above are also covered in Amazon KDP's own "Simplified eBook Manuscript Formatting Guide": https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200645680.

Next we will use KDPs Kindle Create to create a "bullet-proof" ebook for Amazon.

Adding Chapter Titles

Title Page and Section Breaks
Just to make this start looking like a real book, let's add a quick and dirty title page. First of all, make sure you are viewing your document in "Print Layout" (select this in the View tab). Then type the name of your book at the top of the page. Then with the cursor at the end of the title click the tab "Layout", "Breaks", and type n (or click on "Next Page"). This will create a new page and a new "section" (which will be important when it comes time to add footers and page numbers).

Navigation Pane
On page 2 (you may need to delete a blank line here or there when doing Section breaks) we can start putting Chapter titles. At this point you should have the Navigation Pane active. Click the View tab, and make sure the Navigation Pane is checked. This will help you move around the book by chapter.

Chapter Headers
Select the word "Chapter 1" (or however you spelled your first header, "1.", "I.", "ONE", etc.). In the Home tab go to Styles section on the right and click on "Heading 1". This will cause "Chapter 1" to be reformatted and also place it in the Navigation Pane. Then put your cursor at the end of the 1st chapter and add a Section break (as described above). Repeat this for every chapter. If your book is hundreds of pages, you can use Ctrl-F to find the word "chapter" and repeat the process for all your chapters. At this point your book is probably starting to look much nicer.

The Style "Heading 1" is a default setting in Word but it can be customized later. In fact, this automatic customizing feature is the reason why we will be using Styles to format every part of our book. By changing the format of a particular Style, it will change all headers in the book automatically in one stroke. This is true for regular text, sub-headers, quotation marks, lists, etc. Although this is not that important for ebooks (which do not have strictly defined font formats), this will be very handy when creating a document for the paperback.

Repeat this step for sub-headings and choose the Style "Heading 2".

Repeat this step for quoted paragraphs and choose the Style "Quote".

To see more available default Styles click the down arrow ("V") in the lower right corner of the Styles panel.

The results may not be exactly what you want, but in the next step we will start customizing the default Styles and creating some new ones.

Next: Assigning Styles to Paragraphs.

Importing Into Microsoft Word

Import without Formatting
No matter what format your book has been written in, whether as a series of blog entries or in a Notepad file, it will be necessary to reformat it into a Word document. This is the most widely-accepted file format used by most publishers and has everything you need to make a real book.

In my case I selected all of the content in each of my blog entries (by clicking and dragging) and then pasted each blog entry into Word. I originally did a straight Ctrl-V paste, which was a mistake and caused a few headaches. The correct way to do this is to Rt click and then select the 3rd box under Paste Options (Keep Text Only). This can also be done with Rt click-T.

Remove Blank Lines
Next, we want to get rid of blank lines in between paragraphs. These look good in blogs but not in books. Do this by Ctrl-H, and then replace ^p^p with ^p (this replaces 2 carriage returns with 1). If there still empty lines remaining then repeat this command. Later we will put spaces in between certain types of paragraphs, but it will be done through the Styles feature in Word in a future step. Because we imported by copying and pasting with Keep Text Only, there shouldn't be any "manual line breaks". These occur in blogs as well. Just in case, you can get rid of these by Ctrl-H and replacing ^l with ^p.Now we have a Word document which is continuous text with no formatting at all.

If you are starting from a manuscript in a Word document, it's still a good idea to do the above. Select All (Ctrl-A), Copy (Ctrl-C), open a new Word doc, paste and Keep text only (Rt-clk-T). Remove all blank lines (paragraph breaks and manual line breaks).

Pictures and Tables
If your source has pictures then this process will not include them in the new document. It's better to reinsert them manually. However at this point remember to remove any captions (which do get copied over). If the source has tables then they will not transfer over properly. Ebooks do not handle tables very well at all. The best way to preserve this kind of content is to recreate them as bulleted lists. This is a real pain in the ass, but the first step is to do a regular copy and paste of the source table into your document. Then select the Table tab in the top right corner. In the tab bar click Layout on the far right, then Convert To Text (I use "Other" with a 1 character space as the delimiter). From there it's a manual process of finagling.

Remove Hyperlinks
If your blog entries have lots of links then these should be delinked.  Press CTRL+A to select the entire document and then press CTRL-SHIFT-F9. Then change all colors to black and de-underline the whole document.

Next we will start Adding Chapter Titles.

Introduction

Writing Books In Public
Over the last several years I have been writing blogs centered around composers, writers, or television series. Blogs are typically used as a kind of "online diary", but in my case I used the "installment" nature of blog posting as a way to upload posts about individual records, books or TV series. Ultimately, a few of these blogs were "completed" - that is, my blog posts about a certain composer or TV series had covered every single record/episode of my subject. With the final addition of a few "appendices" posts, I more or less considered these blog projects to be a kind of online book, with each blog post standing in for a chapter. Obviously this is not an approach I pioneered, but it's one I stumbled on and so far it has worked out pretty well (to find out more of my many blog projects check out my Profile).

Blog Becomes Book
Recently, a small press publisher offered to turn one of my blogs into an actual printed book. The book was very successful (due to the book subject's fanbase on Facebook mostly) and 400 copies went out. After my relationship with that publisher ended, I decided to publish the book myself using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program. In the end I was able to publish my book as a Kindle ebook and paperback, as well as on various other digital platforms like Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc. There are many paid services which can take an author's manuscript and format it so that it can be sold on Amazon. I decided to try and figure it out myself through Amazon's KDP University and by watching about 12 hours of YouTube How-To videos. It was alot of work but in the end I got exactly what I wanted, saving a thousand dollars in service fees and avoiding lots of arguments with editors. The purpose of this blog project is to record the steps I took to make my own book, mainly so I can do this again in the future, but also perhaps as an aid to people who might want to give this process a go.

The Heavy Lifting
There are many resources on how to write a book, but here are some techniques I used in my particular case which might be of interest to some writers:

• Be passionate about your subject. Be prepared to invest at least half a year to get to a first draft.
• Blog each chapter as they are completed. These constitute first drafts. 
• Promote your blog on Facebook using Facebook Groups. Interact on these Groups to establish your presence on the Group. 
• Don’t forget to thank the Group for any feedback you get during the process. 

OK, assuming we have completed a draft for a book, let's move on to the next step...

Importing into Word.