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And if you could link, blog, tweet, or post to Facebook about my service, I will be ETERNALLY GRATEFUL!

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Many other services are available, too!

This week, I’ll be editing and finishing my Kindle formatting series, so if you have any questions or anything in particular you want me to cover, please let me know!

So did your team win at the Super Bowl? Did you watch? What was your favorite commercial? And most importantly: WHAT’D YOU EAT?

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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?

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If I were working along with this series, I would apply each of these changes to my first chapter. When I finished working with this post and the next post, I’d copy the lot, then paste it at the beginning of each chapter, making the appropriate changes. I’d wait until after the next installment, because the styling for the first sentence of the first paragraph can easily be pasted right along with the chapter heading.

Style Code

We’ll be manipulating the style code today, even though I won’t cover the coding for the head portion of your html document until the next installment. You may decide to change parts of this later, so think of this as a foundation. You will almost definitely change the “margin-top” numbers. For now, at the beginning of your document, above the </head>, paste this code:

<style>

p.noindent { text-indent:0; margin-top:60;}
p.right { text-align:right; }
p.left { text-align:left; }
p.image { text-indent:0; text-align:center; }
.center { text-align:center; }
h1 { text-align:center; margin-top:120; }
h2 { text-align:center; }
h3 { text-align:center; }
h4 { text-align:center; }
h5 { text-align:center; }

</style>

Absolute Must-Have

Start each chapter on a new page. If you do no other formatting, please do this. Nothing looks sloppier than a chapter starting only a hard enter away from the last paragraph of the former chapter, helter-skelter in the middle of the page. It will be the first code you enter at the beginning of a chapter:

 <mbp:pagebreak />

Header Sizing

Decide which line in your chapter heading will be largest. If you have “Chapter 1” first, and the next line is the title of Chapter 1, you probably want Chapter 1 to be <h3> or <h2>, and the title to be <h1>. Here is a sample of what each heading looks like on the Kindle.

You unfortunately do not have control of the font, unless you use an image instead of text.

Bookmark

For your table of contents, put a bookmark after the page break and before the chapter heading. Something like this is fine:

<a name="chap1"/>

Obviously, you’ll want to change "chap1" to "chap2" for the second chapter, and so on.

Heading Style

If you wish to make any part of the heading in italics, you have two choices: the first way is to surround the text with the <i> tag. If you decide not to use italics with the <h1> tag on your title pages, then this way might be the easiest way to go.

<h1><i>h1 Heading, Italics</i></h1>

If you wish to universally apply italics every single time you use the <h1> tag (or <h2>, <h3>, etc.), then alter the <style> code at the top of your document:

h1 { text-align:center; font-style:italic; }

(If you know CSS, you can create separate classes, but I’m trying to make this simple for now.)

Once you decide the sizing and style of each line of your heading, you need to decide whether you want them aligned to the left, center, or right.

Heading Alignment

To align the heading left, center, or right, alter the style code with your choice of one of the following:

h1 { text-align:left; }

h1 { text-align:center; }

h1 { text-align:right; }

The other alignment we need to alter is how far you’re pushing down the text from the top of the page. As a rule of thumb, I generally push the first heading down 120 pixels. You don’t want to push it down too far, because if your reader is resizing the text to be bigger, then you still want all of your chapter heading and at least the first line of your text to show up on the first “page.”

Whichever heading tag is first on this page, add the “margin-top” styling to the style code:

h1 { text-align:center; margin-top:120; }

If you have more than one line using different header sizes, you might want to put a little space between each line. Or not. Whatever you decide, you can use this method to push text down.

Images

To insert an image, whether for decoration or as a replacement to chapter headers so you have more design freedom, use the following code:

<p class="image"><img src="image.jpg" alt="name of image" align="top"/></p>

The Kindle accepts .bmp, .gif, .jpg, and .png files. If you want to the image to span the width of the Kindle page, then 520 pixels wide is your best bet. The Kindle resizes images with varying results and more complexity than I’m going to go into in this series. Also, keep your image under 64 kb. (You can compress it when you save it as a .jpg in Gimp or Photoshop.)

In the style code, you can alter (or add) the "margin-top" and "text-align" attributes in the style at the top of your document, just as I’ve shown you above. In the place where you’ve inserted the image (such as the beginning of the chapter), you can change the "align=" to top, middle, or bottom, which will align the image vertically to the top of the line, the middle of the line, or the bottom of the line.

Next Installment

Tomorrow we’ll style and code the first line of the first paragraph after the chapter heading and for each section within a chapter.

Any questions? And what will help you most for the post after that? Should I include pictures and the precise coding I used, so you can see examples? Or should I move on?

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There’s about three or four more posts in this series. I’m really trying to make it easy, but if I lose you, I am available to format books for the Kindle. I’ll make an information page with pricing when I finish this series, but I really hope I can teach you to do it on your own. It’s fun!

Limitations

The HTML allowed by Kindle is limited. You cannot choose your font. You can make it smaller, you can make it bigger, you can futz with it to make it looks like small caps, but unless you use an image file, you’re stuck with Kindle default font. The supported HTML is limited, too. You can manipulate the margins on the left side, but not on the right side.

Design Ideas

These images are taken from the print books, because they generally have better formatting than the ebooks, with the exception of the last example.

(Frostbite by Richelle Mead: Razorbill)

I love this formatting. The “One” has a regular cap “O” then small caps for “ne.” The backdrop “VA” is VERY beautiful. (Yes, I’m gaga over this simple thing, and if when I get published by New York, I will fly to NY and kiss the book designer if they do something this beautiful for me. It’s on my dream list.) For the Kindle, you’d have to create this image with Gimp or Photoshop or somesuch. You’d have to create a separate image for each chapter heading, and be sure to save as .jpg and compress them a bit.

There’s a lot of detail to admire in this book. The first five words are small caps. Also note the chapter starts with an up cap—one of the few up caps I like—which could be created by an image file or tags:

<big><big><big><big>I</big></big><big></big> 

The up cap appears often in Kindle design as seen in the picture on the right. To me, this looks lazy and boring. No small caps, no italics, no first-line or first-few-words formatting, no nothing. Except one weird, slightly-taller letter. This was fairly standard for awhile, but New York is starting to design their ebooks with as much care as they design their print books, thank goodness.

(Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith:
Grand Central Publishing)

Okay, wow, this is another beautiful example of book design. Look at all that typography! I would probably use <h3> tags for the “ONE,” an image file for the separator, <h1> tags for “Exceptional Child,” a blockquote for the quote, centered, italicized text for the attribution, a centered and bold Roman numeral, and a drop cap image.

The challenge for this one would be to make the top and bottom margins small enough that you could fit this heading on one page. If it’s split between two pages when a reader adjusts their font size, it’s going to lose its beauty. If I were designing it, I might just force a page break before the Roman numeral.

(Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose: Harper)

First notice the chapter number is right-aligned with a right margin. The Kindle does not allow for right margins, so you’d have to right-align the heading and put a couple non-breaking spaces after the “1” by adding &nbsp; a few times.

The chapter title is right-aligned, all caps, italics, and bold. The quote is within blockquote, and the attribution is right-aligned. Notice the name is in all caps and the title is italicized. The drop cap could be created with an image file.

(The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien: Mariner Books)

I featured this design because it starts with an illustration. The “Chapter” is not actually highlighted in real life. (Ignore that.) The separator would be made with an image. “Chapter I” would be done with the <h2> tag and “The Childhood of Turin” would be done with the <h1> tag. Aside from the “noindent,” no formatting is applied to the first line. Works perfectly.

(The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

This formatting surprised me, because there was no blank space above the “Chapter I.” It started at the very top of the page. Everything is left-aligned, including the fancy image. This drop cap is beautiful, because it drops down and goes up.

(Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer: Little, Brown Books)

This is a fairly standard design. Notice the Chapter Heading is done without the word “Chapter,” but with a number, a period, and then a title. There is letter spacing applied to the title. Throughout the book, the first line is always in small caps and non-indented. Because the Kindle can change font size, you can’t control how many words will appear on the first line, so you’d have to decide to small cap, say, the first five or so words.

(The Devil’s Pitchfork by Mark Terry: Midnight Ink.)

You’ll notice this chapter heading has only the number, underlined. The first paragraph is not indented, and throughout the book, the first four words are written in small caps. This transfers well to the Kindle. All sections are begun with the same formatting as the first paragraph of the chapter.

The time and location is in italics, and we’d need to toy with the style a little, probably creating one noindent style with a top margin and one without. (If this is Greek, no worries, probably tomorrow will help.) 

(Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: Ballantine Books)

Notice that there is no chapter heading at all. The first letter is an up cap made from an image. The first line is made of all small caps. Kinda cool!

(Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris: Ace)

I find this formatting interesting, because the chapter heading is not centered. For this, we’d have to add a margin-left to our h1 code. (Tomorrow.) The first line is in both bold and italics. Again, this wouldn’t transfer to the Kindle, but you could choose to do that with, say, the first five words.

(Kushiel’s Avatar by Jacqueline Carey: Tor Fantasy (Paperback))

(Kindle version)

The Kindle image doesn’t do this design justice. I snagged the image from Kindle for PC, but on the real Kindle, that top bar sizes to the width of the Kindle page, so it aligns with the text below it. It looks FANTASTIC on the Kindle. Above the Kindle image, I included the paperback image, so you could compare.

The Next Installment

Tomorrow we’ll finish the coding for the start of the chapter. I know I’ve included some of the coding above: it was easiest that way. I’m thinking of putting this all in a Kindle book, so if you have any suggestions on organizing this information a little better, I’d sure appreciate it.

Now it’s your turn: check out the books on Amazon that say “Look Inside!” and notice how the chapters are begun. Go to your bookshelf. Browse the bookstore and the library. Almost any design, with the proper coding, can be replicated on the Kindle, so let’s give our e-books the same, quality design as print books.

Are there any examples I left out? Anything you like that’s not included? What are some of your favorite elements from above?

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Quotations and Apostrophes

Let’s get our quotation marks and apostrophes straightened out. Or, rather, curlied out. If you’ve come from a text editor, then you’ll notice some of your quotation marks are straight rather than curly.

Go to “Word Options,” click “Proofing,” and then click “AutoCorrect Options.” (If you’re not using Word 2007, there may be a slight variation in finding these menu items.) Under “AutoFormat,” make sure “Straight quotes with smart quotes” is checked.

1. Do a Find and Replace operation.
2. Put a " in the “Find” line, and a " in the Replace line. In the dialog box, they will both appear as straight quotes, but don’t worry.
3. Click “Replace All,” and your entire document will be filled with curly quotes instead of straight quotes.
4. Do a second Find and Replace operation.
5. Put a ‘ in the “Find” line and a ‘ in the Replace line.
6. Click “Replace All,” and your entire document will be filled with a curly apostrophe instead of a straight one.

When copy-editing, you should check to make sure your curly quotes are all going the right way. We can fix these things later, but it’s harder to see them.

Prepare to Find and Replace

At the beginning of your document, put a left curly quote, a right curly quote, left apostrophe, right apostrophe, and em dash. (Am I forgetting something?) Like this:

“ — ‘ ’ ”

And it wouldn’t hurt to do this one, too, just in case.

—“ (Only do this one if you never use this sequence. I never have this sequence, and if it’s there, then it was supposed to be —”. So below, when I put it in the Find and Replace, I’ll make it —”. Please don’t do this one if —“ would be correct in your document.)

Do not use two hyphens instead of an em dash, unless you’ve got it set up to auto-correct to an em dash, and you verify that it did become an em dash. Go to “Insert,” then “Symbol,” then “Special Characters,” and select the em dash. (I use the em dash so much, that I reassign the keystroke for the em dash to CTRL+M.)

Check how you handle ellipses. Did they automatically convert to a single characters, such as …, or did you put a space between each period, like this: . . . ? When you do the Find and Replace operation, you’ll need to know which to search for, and how you want it formatted in your final document.

One Last Thing

Check how you handle scene breaks within a chapter. Generally this is done with one extra, hard ENTER. Do you have a space in this line? Do you use three stars or some such thing? (***) We will need to find these scene breaks later, in order to format them, so it’s best to know what to search for.

Convert to HTML

While there are multiple ways to do this, I’m only going to show you the best and easiest way. The other methods require more intensive clean-up, and it’s just not worth it.

1. Download and install Notepad++ for Windows, or Text Wrangler for Macs. You can use Notepad for Windows, but if you use Notepad, it can add whole hours to your work process later. DO NOT USE MICROSOFT WORD OR A WORD PROCESSOR.
2. Get a free Gmail account.
3. Email yourself the novel to the Gmail account.
4. Go to that email, and under the attachment, click “View as HTML.”
5. Once that page opens, right-click the page, and click “View Page Source.”
6. Click in that page source, press CTRL+A, then CTRL+C.
7. Click in Notepad++, then press CTRL+V.
8. Click “Save As” in Notepad++, and make sure “Save as Type” is “All files.” Then save your document as “yournoveltitle.html”

CLEAN

Kindle accepts very limited HTML, and it does not accept the font tag, among other things. Probably, at the beginning of each paragraph, you’ll notice something like this:

<font size="3" face="Courier">

You’ll probably only have one or two of these, and the rest of the document will be the same. Do a find operation for what you have, make sure the replace field is empty (no space, even), and hit “Replace All.” Do the same thing for </font>.

If you have a lot of <p align=“center”> or <p align=“left”>, may as well replace those with <p>.

If you did not already fix the paragraphs, you might see some space after the <p> tag. We don’t want this space. It should be the <p> tag, and then your text. If there is space, highlight it, copy it, and then do a Find and Replace operation, replacing it with nothing, which effectively deletes it.

Now your document should just be your text, with only the following tags in it: <p> </p> <br>

Find and Replace

We need to do a number of Find and Replace operations to do some basic coding of our characters. We’ll take care of the design and format coding in the next few installments. You can use the little cheat sheet you made at the beginning of your document to highlight each character, copy it, and paste it in the Find box. Paste the following code in the Replace box, then hit Replace All.

Notice you have two choices for your ellipses. This is just a style issue, and the Chicago Manual of Style (the go-to book for formatting fiction, generally) calls for the second version, with a non-breaking space in between each period. (As well as before and after, but I’m assuming you took care of that in the copy-editing phase.)

If you want the second version, but you used the first version in your document, you’ll have to Find the … and replace with .&nbsp;.&nbsp&. .

There are other HTML Characters that might need coding, such as 1/2 and 1/4 and the like. Consult this guide to check if you have any other characters to convert.

The Next Installment

The next installment is the most fun, in my opinion: the design! Since we’re all creative types, this will probably be much easier than these. After deciding on the design, I will show you how to code your design, so you understand how it works. (We’ll also fix any lingering html issues at that time, too.)

Do you see any mistakes? Anything I missed in the clean-up process? Anything confusing? Anything I need to correct?

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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?

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(Most of this is probably obvious to lots of you. I promise to be more useful in the next installment. I only write this installment because I’ve seen these issues in real life, so they bear mentioning.)

This isn’t just for those who want to go indie. If you’re in the querying race, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to follow these guidelines as well. Several agents forward and read manuscripts on their Kindles. Following these guidelines will ensure that, after Kindle’s conversion, your document will look its best.

No, an agent, as far as I can tell, is not going to reject you because your paragraph indents are a little wonky. But it never hurts to pay a little attention to appearance.

Paragraph Indentations

When you start writing your novel, CTRL+A the entire thing, click “Paragraph Properties” (or the little downward arrow next to “Paragraph” under the “Home” tab of 2007), and set your format. If you do it this way, you can always make universal changes without manually going through your entire document.

Never use the tab key to start a paragraph.

Or multiple spaces.

New Chapters

When ending a chapter, hit CTRL+ENTER to start a new page. Then hit the ENTER key until you get where you want, type “Chapter X,” hit ENTER again, and then start your chapter.

If you like your Chapter Heading formatted in the middle, without the indentation, then highlight the chapter heading only and adjust the paragraph settings for that alone. (Highlighting and then pressing CTRL+E will center it, but it will be a little off if you’ve got your paragraphs set to indent the first line. So go into Paragraph settings, with the Chapter Heading highlighted, and set to no indent.)

I suggest doing this after you start the first paragraph, because it’s simplest if you’re not already handy at this sort of thing.

Never hit “Enter” a bunch of times to get to a new page, in order to start your next chapter.

Title Pages and Chapter Headings

The formatting for your title page and chapter headings should again be done via paragraph settings. I covered how to do the chapter headings in the paragraph above. The same method applies to your title page. Type the text only, then highlight and format it via the paragraph settings.

Again, never use the tab key or space key to indent.

Spacing

One space, not two, and that goes for NY Publishing, too. Just do a “Find and Replace” operation: Put two spaces in the “Find” line, and one space in the “Replace” line. Then hit “Replace all.”

If your novel is already written with these issues in it, don’t worry. I’ll show you how to fix it later. The only reason to fix it now is if you’re about to send it to an agent who you know or think will forward it to their Kindle.

If you’re sending it to an agent who you think might forward your novel to their Kindle, it wouldn’t hurt to CTRL+A your document, set the paragraph settings, and then see if some paragraphs are set oddly and some aren’t. If some have larger indentations, then you probably used the tab key or multiple spaces to start the paragraph. Highlight the tabbed space (or multiple spaces), CTRL+C the problematic space, and then open the “Find and Replace” dialogue. CTRL+V the problematic space in the “Find” line, and make sure the “Replace” line is completely empty. Then hit “Replace All.”

You might have to adjust your title page and chapter headings if you make a universal change to the paragraph settings. To avoid that, you can go through and just highlight the body of your text, one chapter at a time, and set the paragraph settings that way.

If you see a disaster after performing a Find and Replace operation, don’t panic. Just hit CTRL+Z, and it will undo. Then make sure you didn’t highlight and copy an extra space or ENTER keystroke.

Next Installment

The next installment will discuss why you should format your novel for the Kindle, and a brief overview of what goes into book design.

How do you use Word? How do you format your novel as you go along? Any tips I missed? Or is this way too basic for you? (Sorry!)

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