Natasha Fondren

Why should we format for the Kindle? Details matter. In your writing craft, I’m sure you would have no problem arguing this point, but sometimes when we stray outside of our own craft, the details we usually don’t notice seem unimportant to us. In writing, we all know the details and little things of our craft are what takes a novel to the next level; it’s no different for any other craft, such as book design.

The Problem with Converters

Plenty of converters out there will convert your document from Word to Kindle, including Amazon’s own DTP site. If you want a professional-looking book, don’t use them.

Things like this can happen (The blacked-out names are just to make the text anonymous, LOL.):

As you can see, some of the paragraphs are indented a quarter of an inch, and some are indented half of an inch. The left quotations marks show up as Ò, and the right quotation marks show up as Ó. Sometimes they show up as straight quotes ("), instead of curly quotes (”). Apostrophes show up as Õ. The em dash is not a true em dash, but two hyphens. (Acceptable for manuscripts, but not for the final product.) Chapter 2 does not start on a new page, as it should, and there’s an indent in the first paragraph of the chapter, where there shouldn’t be.

Book Design

There’s more to book design than just putting words in order and ensuring there are curly quotes instead of straight quotes. There are universal styles to respect. If you want to compete with New York titles, then you need to design your book as well as NY titles. Last year, this was easy, because NY publishing houses were just throwing their stuff through converters and it looked like crap. I have a Neil Gaiman title where there are whole pages without spaces between the sentences. But they’ve caught on, and they’re doing real design work with their e-publications, just like they do with the print publications.

Grab a couple books off your shelf, or browse through your local bookstore.

You’ll notice that each chapter and each new scene (after a section break) within a chapter all start with a non-indented paragraph. (What’s the section break called? There’s a fancy term for it, I think.) You’ll also notice that usually there’s a drop-cap, or sometimes the first few words have special formatting, such as small caps or italics. Sometimes this formatting is only applied to the beginning of a chapter, and sometimes it’s also applied to new scenes.

These are signals to the reader, and readers are accustomed to them, whether or not they realize it. Anything that makes it easier for readers to read is important.

Front Matter

Also note the front matter, which includes the title page, copyright page, dedication, possibly the acknowledgments, preface, foreword, and table of contents.  The Chicago Manual of Style has, in the past, dictated the order of the front matter, but things are changing for both Kindle and print publications. For the Kindle, for example, it’s unnecessary to put the Table of Contents at the beginning, when readers access the TOC with a simple click from the menu. In addition, the list of “Other Books By Author” tends to be at the end, with links so that a reader can go to the book in Kindle’s store directly and buy, without searching.

For print publications, I was startled to notice that the front matter has been changing these past couple months. I picked up a Scholastic book the other day, which had only the title page, an illustration, and then the text of the story. The rest, including the copyright info and Library of Congress info, was all shoved to the back. I suspect the thinking on this is similar to the thinking of why people are shoving the front matter to the back on the Kindle: when people are sampling or browsing a book, the quicker they can get to the text, the better.

I’m not sure which publisher was the other one who was manipulating front matter to the back, but it was one of the big ones. Random House? I noticed it particularly in the YA section, which I think is important: YA readers grew up reading on computers and the like.

Next Installment

Tomorrow I’ll show you how to strip your document of all the junk Word puts in, and then prepare your document for both formatting and design.

Have you noticed the different styles applied to the first sentence in a new chapter? Do you have a favorite? Drop caps? Small caps? Italics? Any styles I haven’t mentioned? And did you notice anything I didn’t cover?