Cracking the Kindle formatting code

It has taken me a while but I finally found a way to format my books for the Amazon Kindle program. At the beginning of July, late on a Sunday evening, I stumbled upon a proper formatting for my book A Work in Progress: Exercises in Writing. I'd spent quite a few hours trying to figure out how to reformat my Word file of this book so that it looked good in Amazon's DTP preview. Suddenly it did.

Without taking notes, though even then I may not have even realized how exactly I did it, I turned my attention to preparing my books for Apple's iBookstore - it took me about a week to figure out how to reformat to the epub format and do everything else required to prepare my three titles.

Then I returned to the Kindle program with the goal to prepare my other two books for it - however, I had absolutely no clue how I had done it with my first book and no matter what I tried I couldn't get a layout in the DTP preview that looked good enough.

It took me until now to crack the code (again). In hindsight it should not have taken me this long. This site was very helpful. It reminded me how to use Word properly (something I learned in the Book Editing & Publishing course I took at Macleay College in Sydney five years ago) and pointed me toward Mobipocket to finish off the process. Thanks CJ!

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