Kindle Formatting for Novels VI
Styling and coding the first bit of a chapter or section is part of what signals to a reader that a new section has begun. We’ve been trained as readers to this for years by print books. Now I’ll show you how to do it in an ebook.
Just like a cover, the formatting of your novel should reflect your novel. The style you choose should match your writing style, genre, and story. For example, a few writers start every chapter with one attention-getting sentence, rather short, that is its own paragraph. The formatting should reflect this set-apart sentence. Another example: A hard-core military thriller might use small caps instead of italics, while a Victorian romance would probably be the opposite.
If the length of your chapters’ first sentences tends to vary widely, you probably want to apply your first-line formatting to a set number of words, rather than the whole first sentence.
Whatever method you choose, it should be uniformly applied to all chapters and new sections throughout the book.
Also note that people often use several of these techniques, rather than just choosing one. For example, you can italicize the first five words after a drop cap image. Again, check out “Kindle Formatting for Novels III: Design Ideas” for inspiration.
No Indent
The first paragraph should have no indentation at both the beginning of a chapter and the beginning of a new section within a chapter organizes the text to the eye. This is the second bit of formatting that is one of my must-haves. I’m no typography expert, but this hasn’t been a mainstay of book formatting for decades for no reason.
In the style code, I also put a margin at the top, to push the beginning of the chapter down from the chapter heading. This margin will also push down the beginning of the paragraph of the new section.
The Kindle indents by default, so you have to manually set it not to indent. In the style section, as I posted in the previous installment, “Kindle Formatting for Novels V: Coding the Chapter Headings,” put the following line:
p.noindent { text-indent:0; margin-top:60;}
When you start a new chapter or new section within a chapter, change the <p> to <p class=“noindent”>.
Styling the First Sentence
If you look at print books, and most ebooks these days, you’ll notice that the first sentence of each chapter and section is styled a certain way. Below are some of the options that transfer well to the Kindle.
Small Caps
Small caps is my favorite, but it’s also time-consuming. Usually it’s done to either the first four or five words in the chapter, and the number of words small-capped is the same throughout the book. Note that if you have a capital letter within the small-capped section, you will have to make sure it is outside the small tags. If you apply this style, your code will look like this:
<p class="noindent">H<small><small>ERE</small></small> N<small><small>ATASHA USES SMALL CAPS</small></small> for the first five letters.</p>
Italics
Italics are the easiest and quickest style to apply, since you only need to wrap the words with the <i></i> tags. I’ve seen this applied to the first sentence, but if the length of your first sentences varies greatly, choosing a specific number of words gives your chapter a more uniform and polished finish. Often I see this styling in combination with a drop cap or up cap.
Here’s the code:
<p class="noindent"><i>Here Natasha uses italics for the first sentence.</i></p>
And here is the outcome on the Kindle:
You can also apply bold with <b></b> tags, but this is usually done when combined with other styling.
Up Cap Images
“Drop” caps are done by inserting images into the text. Unfortunately, no formatting code is supported that will actually make these letters drop, so you’re forced to make them go up. (Frustrating, I know.)
You will need to upload your image to the same folder where you have saved the .html file of your novel.
<p class="noindent"><img src="hcap.gif" alt="H" align="left" />ere Natasha applies a drop cap to the first letter.</p>
Up Caps with Text only
Up caps can be done without images as a quick (and dirty) way to start a chapter or section. Especially when used alone, I think it appears a bit lazy and inelegant, but that’s just my opinion. Sometimes they add bold and/or italics to this letter.
<p class="noindent"><big><b>H</b></big>ere Natasha uses an up cap with bold formatting.</p>
Remember that you don’t need to pick one of these methods. You can mix them up to create your own style. Beware of going gaudy though; simple and elegant is always easier to read. 
Next Installment
Next we’ll talk about images! Fun, fun!
Any questions? Anything I can do to make this better? Anything I left out?
29 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Natasha Fondren is a writer traveling the U.S. in a camper with her four cats. She is currently enjoying the lizards and desert heat in Arizona.
You left out buying a new brain. A nice young one would be good. I tried to command my mac and it told me to f- off. It won’t take commands. It commanded me to feed it some electricity and go rob a bank to pay for the 4th battery it’s burned out.
LOL, Robin! Shame on it!
You’re doing great! I’m used to the italics and bold from blogging. The rest looks really good too. Thanks!
Awesome, Edie!
I’m hiring someone to do this. If I try to learn it, I think my head will blow up.
It’s not as hard as I make it seem. I don’t think. I’m not sure.
Looking good…I like the up caps
LOL! Thanks, Colby!
Very interesting, Natasha!
Love all this insider info and a glimpse into the world of professional writing. Wow!
Cool, Darcy!
What about using style=”float:left” for drop caps?
Example here: http://www.w3schools.com/css/tryit.asp?filename=trycss_float4
Yeah, doesn’t work. Kindle supports only a small bit of HTML 4, not all of it.
I don’t know what their reasoning on THAT is!
Thank you for your series. I just acquired the parts you’ve published up to date. I’m conversant in HTML, but Amazon’s site is so wretched that I turned to YouTube and found someone’s “turn a book into a kindle in 10 minutes” video just to get started (he was just doing the basics; obviously you can’t do it in ten).
So thanks again. Looking forward to the next bit!
Hi Natasha!
We have been faced with a repetitive and similar problem in a lot of the ebooks we have encountered (specifically with maintaining drop caps over Kindle and Adobe Editions)! I’m not sure if this would be helpful to you or your readers but here is how we do it: http://stunjelly.com/e-books-drop-caps/
This makes everything so cmoplletey painless.
Oh yay!
Wow, did you just help me a ton with formatting for my second book. Thank you SO much for posting all this. You have officially raised your karmic level.
Yay! I’m glad it helped!
Is there a way to do dot-leaders?
Oh, my, I’ve been searching everywhere for some of this information. (I knew I could just go back to my HTML and CSS text books, but I wasn’t sure all all this interacted with Kindle’s defaults.)
Now all I need is the time to upgrade my books….
Great series with wonderful tips, thanks. Do you know what code I need to insert at the start of each chapter so that a reader can advance to the next chapter with a finger swipe on the Kindle Touch? I’ve tried both page break and section breaks in Word then converted to HTML, but the chapter advancement doesn’t work. Thanks in advance.
The short answer is that you need to build a toc.ncx, save it inside the folder mobipocket builds, and then modify your .opf file to include this between the manifest:
And where it says change to
Didn’t show up. Let me try again. Modify your .opf file to include this between the manifest:
<item id=”toc” media-type=”application/x-dtbncx+xml” href=”toc.ncx”></item>
And where it says <spine> change to:
<spine toc=”toc”>
Great, thanks so much. I’ll give it a try. I appreciate you getting back to me!
Natasha, I like you site. It’s help me a lot. A silly question is what happened to Kindle Formatting for Novels I – V ?
Hi Dave!
They are all here, listed in descending order: http://www.natashafondren.com/writing/category/kindle-formatting/.
Is the conversion process to Kindle formatting able to handle a bilingual(English-Spanish)glossary where the English and Spanish writing systems appear in separate lines? Thank you for considering this question.
Hmmm… well, see, the words, “conversion process” throw me off. If you’re looking to upload a Word document and have it automatically convert to what you want, chances are you’re not going to get what you want. If you hire a professional ebook developer (like me, LOL!), then they can definitely design and format your book so that it will do what you want within the limitations of the Kindle format. It’ll look better in .epub for Barnes & Noble and Apple iBooks, and also Kindle Format 8, when it’s released.
Thanks so much for explaining what Kindle does with indents! I was going crazy wondering why the indents don’t look anything like the HTML version that Word displays. And no one at Smashwords could tell me either. Great site!