One of the most common methods of preparing Kindle Books—and one of the most highly recommended by Amazon—is to start with a Microsoft Word document, convert it to HTML, and then submit this on Amazon’s Digital Text Platform for final conversion to Kindle format. You can find instructions for this around the Web and in books on Kindle publishing. Most often, these instructions are based on the premise that Word’s HTML output requires extensive alteration and cleanup before submission.
This is exactly wrong.
At least for a text-only book, it turns out that Word’s HTML is almost perfectly suited to Kindle conversion with little or no change. Yes, Word’s export feature generates a lot of excess code, but not as much if you choose the right option—and the excess that remains is ignored by the Kindle converter. Meanwhile, the best way to control the limited kinds of formatting available for Kindle Books is with formatting you apply to the Word document itself. You might never have to open the HTML file at all!
Here are my quick tips for moving a text-only document from Word to Kindle. This is not meant as a comprehensive guide—so if you get stuck, see your Word documentation or a good book on the program! Also, these tips are based on the original Kindle and the first beta release of Kindle for PC and have not yet been tested with other models or versions. Though later Kindles may have improvements, you’ll still be dealing with earlier ones for some time as lowest common denominators.
• Start with a Word document that’s properly formatted for a book. Among other things, this means using print typography, placing page numbers in headers or footers only, and using section breaks to avoid headers and footers on otherwise blank pages. (If you don’t already know about all of this, see my book Perfect Pages: Self Publishing with Microsoft Word.)
• If you’ve already adjusted line endings—as I recommend in Perfect Pages—with manual line breaks, optional hyphens, or character spacing, those will all have to come out. Find them quickly with the “Special” menu in Word’s Find feature. Likewise with page breaks or linespacing you’ve applied to adjust page bottoms.
• Change your document formatting and/or page setup so that your page roughly emulates the reading area of a Kindle. Though not essential, this will help you see how much of your text fits on a page. The settings I use are
Width: 3.5 inches
Height: 4 inches
Margins: .25 inches all around
Also, I set the font to Trebuchet MS. This is for emulation only, as the Kindle will ignore any fonts you specify.
• For font sizes, use 10, 12, 14, and 18 only. Sizes in between these will be shifted higher or lower by the Kindle.
• Set your paragraph alignment to Left Align instead of Justified. Normally, it’s best not to justify Kindle text, because the Kindle doesn’t hyphenate, often resulting in huge gaps between words in justified lines. Anyway, left alignment leaves the final choice with the Kindle user, who can still make the Kindle justify the text if desired.
• Avoid using manual line breaks within a paragraph—as you might normally want, for example, in a verse of poetry. This is because, if the text is justified—say, because the Kindle user chose that option—any short line ending with a manual line break will wind up spread across the page. (This does not happen, though, with centered paragraphs.) Instead of manual line breaks, make each line a new paragraph.
• You can control how the Kindle indents the first line of your paragraphs by setting this in Word’s paragraph formatting. If you don’t, the Kindle will indent that first line by a default amount.
This creates a slight problem if you want a block paragraph, with a first-line indent of zero. The Kindle perfectly well understands an HTML instruction for zero indent—but because that’s the default for both Word and the Web, Word does not bother including this instruction in the HTML it generates. And without the instruction, the Kindle indents!
The way around this is to set the first-line indent in Word to .01 inch. The Kindle will indent the line by that amount—but to the reader, it won’t look indented at all.
Other limitations: You can’t have hanging indents, or first-line indents greater than 1.5 inches.
• The Kindle will honor left and right paragraph indents, so you can use these for blockquoting and such. But because the line of type is already so narrow, it’s best to indent on the left only—or not at all, if you have another way to distinguish that text.
• You cannot use blank lines to create vertical spacing, because Kindle for PC will ignore them. Instead, use Space Before and Space After in paragraph formatting. Of course, as in any book, there should be no extra space between indented paragraphs in continuous text.
• The original Kindle does not support tables. If you have any, replace them with simpler formatting. And no, tabs won’t work either!
• For page breaks, almost anything you would normally use in Word will work: manual page breaks, section breaks, or “Break page before” settings in your paragraph formatting.
• Insert Word hyperlinks to the Web as needed. They’ll carry right through to your Kindle Book.
• To enable Kindle users to “Go to Beginning” or to the table of contents through the Kindle menu, you can insert bookmarks at these locations in Word. The bookmark for the book’s beginning must be named “start_reading”, all lower case—not just “start”, as often recommended, because that won’t always work! The bookmark for the table of contents must be “toc”. These bookmarks will translate as anchors in Word’s HTML.
• For a table of contents with clickable links, first insert bookmarks throughout the document at your chosen destinations, naming them as you like. Then go back to your table of contents and make each list item a hyperlink to one of those bookmarks. Or just tell Word to hyperlink directly to specific headings, which will insert bookmarks automatically. Or simplest of all, ask Word to generate the table of contents automatically based on headings, with hyperlinks included. (Of course, you should also remove all page numbers from your table of contents.)
• Delete all other bookmarks that you or Word might have inserted. Note: You must do this even if you haven’t inserted bookmarks for the Kindle. Otherwise, the Kindle may treat the first bookmark as the beginning of the book.
• Ready to export? The procedure will vary according to your version of Word, but you’ll be saving as “HTML” or “Web Page” or the like. You want the format that includes the least code. This may be designated as “Web Page, Filtered” or by an option like “Save only display info into HTML.” If in doubt, save in alternate ways and choose the file that’s smallest.
At time of export or before, you should also go into Word’s Web Options and make sure encoding is set to “Unicode (UTF-8)”. Note that this is different from what Amazon recommends! (In Word 2007, you can find Web Options on the Tools menu in the Save As dialog box.)
• Upload your HTML file to Amazon DTP and preview the results online. If you need to make changes, do not make them in the HTML file. Go back to your Word document and make them there. Keep testing and revising till the result satisfies you.
• I said you might never have to open your HTML file, but if you do, there’s one improvement you can make as a final step. When Word writes a bookmark as an anchor in an HTML file, it places the anchor after the paragraph’s opening tag. In a browser, this works fine—but the Kindle’s method of reading files is primitive enough that this placement can cause it to disregard the paragraph’s intended formatting. The Kindle will still go to that paragraph, but it might not look right. Also, going then to the previous page may take two tries, as the first try may take you only to the real beginning of that same top paragraph.
It’s easy to clean up this placement by hand in the HTML file. Here’s an example of how Word might write a heading with an inserted bookmark named “chapter1.” The anchor is shown in bold.
<h1><a name="chapter1"></a>Chapter 1</h1>
To fix this for the Kindle, simply move the entire anchor to the front, like so.
<a name="chapter1"></a><h1>Chapter 1</h1>
Of course, you should make this change in a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit that allows working with plain text. Don’t try editing plain text in Word unless you know exactly how that’s done!
• Don’t expect perfection! The Kindle’s typography is primitive, so your book is never going to look great. But with these adjustments in Word, you can make it about as good as it can get.