12/27/11 – Kindle Formatting

Every How-To suggests meticulously checking over your file formatting before submitting anything for e-publishing, and yesterday I found one good example of why.  The Kindle Previewer allows you to check out a .mobi file in various formats before sending it off, but I wonder how many have noticed that the Kindle For iPad version appears to remove spaces between paragraphs.  Even using asterisks between sections within a chapter will look odd as there’s usually a space before and after the character or icon used to designate breaks.

To bypass the issue while maintaining a consistent look between the different devices, create a paragraph style where the After space is something more than blank or zero.  Smashwords suggests what I feel is a small number, but it all comes down to taste.  For Coincidence, I thought 12 pt would suffice at first since the rest of the text is Times New Roman 12.  I wasn’t happy with how that looked in the preview and set it to 18. 

Now go along and set every final paragraph in a section to that style.  It’s tedious but worth it.  Otherwise, readers may get confused as to why the action suddenly jumped from Protagonist A in Scene 3 to Antagonist B three days later in Setting 4.  Just make sure to remove the space originally set between the paragraphs.

“You don’t need to hide, my friend, for I am just like you” – Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites”