I've noticed quite a few people are having difficulty formatting for Kindle and Nook.  Here are a few tips.

 

To help remove line spacing issues, make sure your manuscript is aligned left and single space instead of double spacing.

If you decide to have a blank line between paragraphs, DO NOT indent. I prefer not to have a blank line between paragraphs to help remove line spacing issues.

 

Do not use tab. If you’ve used it. Don’t worry, you can remove them. Here are instructions for MS Office 2007: Go to your find and replace(control + f). Then do a find on ^t and replace it with nothing. That will remove all tabs. THEN select ALL of your text (control + a), then right click over the text and select paragraph. Inside the paragraph tab select. On indentions you want special and .5.  This is the tab where you can switch to single space and check not to have a line between paragraphs.

 

After you remove the tabs, anything you had centered will be off by a tab. So it will be centered plus a tab space. You'll need to scroll through and manually re-center each line you want centered. To re-center. I just delete everything in front of what's centered so it looks left aligned, then I center it.

 

Same goes for if you already had indention spaces in places of the manuscript. Now you will have two so just delete one of them.

 

Be sure to only use three blank lines between chapters. Any more than three blank lines will cause your ebook to have a blank page in that spot. For font sizes, use 10, 12, 14, and 18 only.

 

Also, when you save the file for uploading, do a "save as" then select "web page filtered" as the format instead of .doc. Use this file for uploading to the Kindle and Nook and your ebook will look MUCH better.

 

It will rarely look perfect because ebooks are quirky when being converted. Just try to get it to look the best it can.

 

I absolutely love http://calibre-ebook.com/ it won't help with formatting your Kindle or Nook ebooks, but it's great to read and convert from one ebook format to another.

 

Hope this helps

Dee

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