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.
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