Formatting Poetry for Kindle

In my last post, I promised I'd talk a bit about the process of uploading work to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service, and in particular having control over how the text is presented on the screen. What follows is not a lesson or a tutorial, merely a 'this is what I did, I thought it worked okay', so please treat it as such.

Despite not having shut up about my impending ebook release for at least the last six months, the day I finally found myself looking at a completed manuscript, I realised I didn't know what to do with it. I can now tell you that the process looks as follows...

1. You start with an HTML document, either created manually, or automatically generated from a Word file saved as Web Page, Filtered.

2. You then use Mobipocket Creator to convert this into a .prc file.

3. After you have checked your book using the Kindle Previewer, you can upload the .prc file to Amazon KDP.

This FAQ explains the process in slightly more detail. Before you start working, you'll obviously need to download Mobipocket Creator and the Kindle Previewer. And back up your work before you start fiddling around with it!

For many people, converting a simply formatted word file using Mobipocket Creator will produce a perfectly readable ebook. (Here is a good website that explains how to format your book simply in Word to survive the conversion process). However, poetry is different. I will illustrate the problem below...



What's that? Oh, it's just a great big indent where you didn't want one, ruining the layout of your poem. Now, of course you could accept this, but poetry readers are used to any non standard typography meaning something. Also, you'll want to minimize the problem of long lines wrapping round and creating line breaks you didn't intend, so it's important that your lines utilize the full width of the page.

At this point, you'll probably start searching for information on how you can format your word doc so that your intended paragraph styles survive the conversion process. You might even try starting a thread on the KDP forums. I spent a day trying every magic fix listed there, and whilst you're obviously free to try them yourself, my advice would be to forget it. No matter how many times I told Word that my 'Normal' paragraph style shouldn't have an indent, I would open my converted book up in Kindle Previewer to find that conversion had stuck one in anyway.

In any case, working with html made me feel much more empowered than trying to exert my control over the fallible word to html conversion.

There are now two ways you can go; you can copy the plain text of your poems into Notepad and rebuild all your formatting from scratch with html, or you can edit the html generated when you save your word file as Web page, filtered. Open it using Notepad, (by the way, Notepad or Notepad +++ will do perfectly fine for editing your html - you don't need any fancy software).



You may well think that second option sounds more sensible, as in retrospect do I. If you fancy getting this out of the way as quickly as possible, cast your eyes down to bullet point one below, implement it, then move straight on to converting, previewing and uploading your book. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who likes to break things down so I can understand them better, so I decided to start from scratch.

Up until this point, I had never really written in html. KDP forum users had recommended specific bits of code, but they weren't much use to me without a framework within which to place them.

If you're as dim about html as me, I would recommend starting out with the tutorials over at w3schools.com. These have a nifty Try It Yourself feature, which allows you to alter some html in a text box, then press a button and see how the resulting web page would change. Although the tutorials are not specifically aimed at formatting ebooks, they are relevent because your html ebook will essentially need to describe one very long, boring webpage.

The following steps describe the process of putting the teeny tiniest bit of formatting onto plain text poems in Notepad to build a simple ebook. Please note that in all the following examples, I've removed the <> brackets around the html, and replaced them with normal brackets (), to stop blogger trying to interpret the tags. You'll need to replace () with <> to get them to work.

1. Removing the indent, and basic text formatting

The Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines, (bizarrely not linked on the KDP FAQ), discusses the issue with indents.

The “normal” text in a Kindle book must be “all defaults.”... “Normal” text must not have a forced alignment (left-aligned or justified).

This seems to me to say that you cannot dictate a default non-indented paragraph style for your document, hence why all my efforts to do this failed. However, the document goes on to list tags that you can apply to each paragraph to override the automatic indent. The one you want is (p style="text-indent:0"). I found it easiest to treat each line as a new paragraph, opening with the aforementioned tag and closed with (/p). I then manually inserted a line break; (/ br), at the end of each stanza. Below, you can see the html, and how it appears in the Kindle Previewer after conversion.





The indents have disappeared. You may now breathe. If you wish, you can edit the html document created by word to reflect the above, and not worry about what any of the other html means. If you're building up from scratch, read on.

2. Page Breaks

Once you've amended your html document so that every poem is formatted as above, (it will take you a while to insert that paragraph tag at the start of every line, but once you get copying and pasting it's not too onerous, I swear!), you'll probably want each of your poems to start on a new page.

This is done using a simple CSS tag, which you'll put at the top of your document, before the body starts. You're going to use this tag to say that there should always be a page break after or before a certain feature. There's a W3Schools tutorial that explains it. I decided to tag all of my poem titles as being Heading 3, by putting the (h3) and (/h3) tags around them, and have a page break before each Heading 3.

The top of my html document now looked like this...

(html)
(head)
(style)
h3{
page-break-before: always;
}
(/style)
(/head)
(body)
Book begins...

And the title of each poem looks like this...

(h3)Barceloneta, May 2010(/h3)(br /)

If you convert your html document in mobipocket creator, and then preview it, you should see each of your poems plainly formatted on a separate page.

3. Cover Image

The image that appears on the first page of your ebook should be of the highest possible quality. You'll refer to it in the html document, and the jpg image needs to be saved in the right place. For instance, you could create a folder called Bookname, which would contain your html document Bookname.html, and a sub folder called Bookname_files, which would contain your image.

The image then needs to be inserted at the beginning of the (body) of your book, as follows...

(p style="text-indent:0")(a name=cover)(img src="Bookname_files/Mycoverimage.jpg")(/a)(/p)

When you use Mobipocket Creator to convert your book, after selecting your html file, you'll need to click on 'Cover Image' on the right, and find the correct file, before building your book.



4. Table of Contents

It's very easy to create an html table of contents at the start of your book, so readers can jump to later poems. First, you'll need to make each place that you'll want to link to an anchor, which will probably mean all of your poem titles.

(a name="eroding")(h3)Our Eroding Coastline(/h3)(/a)


I have now tagged this title as an anchor, and given it a one word name that corresponds with the poem title. Now I can link to it from my TOC.

(h3)Table Of Contents(/h3)(br /)

(a href="#eroding")Our Eroding Coastline(/a)(br /)

Now my reader can click on the link with the kindle cursor and jump to the relevant poem. Note that it isn't possible to check whether links work using the Kindle Previewer, so the best way to check you haven't made a stupid error is to open your html document in your web browser and click on each link.

5. Title Page

You are now terrifyingly close to having formatted your first eBook! The title page goes after the cover image and before the TOC, and what you include on it beyond your title and author name is up to you. All I included was a link to my blog, so that readers know where to keep track of my work, but you might have a dedication, or copyright info. Here's mine, in html, and then in Kindle Previewer...

(h2)Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals(/h2)(br /)
(h2)By Sarah Dawson(/h2)(br /)
(br /)
(p style="text-indent:0")Author of (a href="http://poetryafterink.blogspot.com/")Poetry After Ink(/a)(/p)(br /)
(hr /)

(a name="TOC")(h3)Table Of Contents(/h3)(br /)



I ought to have centered it, I know. Use the (p class=Centered) tag around text the center it. Note that I have tagged the text as h2, so that it won't be affected by the page break command I inserted at the top of the document. However, the title for the TOC is tagged as H3, so a page break will appear before it.

5. Be more creative

If you want make further improvements to your eBook, the best starting point is to read Amazon's (very short) table of supported html tags, which is included in their Publishing Guidelines, (ctrl + f "appendix a" to jump to the right place), and use it as a toolbox.

The only thing I haven't talked about here is creating a Navigation Control File; I have to admit to not understanding them at all. If you're determined to make your eBook 100% pefect, you'll need to investigate them: I recommend this blog post as a good starting point.

Congratulations - you're done! The KDP FAQ explains very clearly how to upload your book from here. If you have any niggles, or any helpful information to add, please do comment.