Monday, August 17, 2020

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!

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