![]() ![]() You can see the extra line space if you really pay attention, but it's a LOT clearer if we do this: Mary watched them through the kitchen window. “Is that right? Well, just you watch me!” “What are you going to do, John?” Sue asked. The Amazon default will look something like: In these cases a simple extra line break is often used. It's still the same setting, same timeline, so putting a break with "***" or whatever doesn't really make sense. When that change of POV happens, you want to make this change clear. In this scene we have 3 characters, two of whom are in a conversation and 1 who we will later become our POV. This is a simulation of the line space problem that Amazon uses as a default. You can download both the PDF and Ebook for free, and email I will send you the notepad I used to create the eBook file. I edited it, made eBook copies and put it on my website for free. I formatted my revised edition of "The Curse of Capistano: The Mark of Zorro." This work was written in 1917 and was in the public domain. In fact, I have a teaching by example book. Yes, it does take discipline to learn how to do this, but it is not too hard. I do not like the conversion programs which often leave formatting junk from your word processor. As I said before I am willing to help an author get control of his product. I have viewed it on other devices and it works fine. Check out my book, "Warzone: Nemesis" on Amazon, under "Look Inside." You can see that I have successful learned to format for Kindle. Yes, but your chapter headings will be the same size as your text font, which I find unacceptable. ![]() So no rules, just what you like while making your work easy to read. We also didn't hyphenate, since Word can go nuts about that. We kept it simple, and didn't do drop-caps or fancy dividers. We went to the library, picked half-a-dozen recent paperback books in our genre, and formatted our print editions based on what we saw. (The publisher - S&S? - really screwed that one up.) Some get weird, like the book printed in brown ink on cream paper (it was steam-punk) that I found quite difficult to read. Hardbacks tend to be formatted different than trade paperback. The same goes for headers, and page numbers (top outside corner vs bottom center). Now that seems to be less common, and in some books I've seen, chapters don't even begin with a new page. For example, it was once more common to always begin a chapter on the right-hand page, leaving a blank page to the left, if necessary. ![]() Different publishers adopt various conventions. There are no hard and fast formatting rules for fiction, that I'm aware of. Is there a hard and fast rule about how far down your sentence should start?. As you see in other novels, there is a large gap between the title of the chapter and the first word of the chapter. JD wrote: "I do have one question about the print version PDF. That's another sign of "amateur" production that readers tend to pick up on.Ĭreatespace does have templates you can download and there are templates and style sheets for Kindle eBook, but I've never looked at any of them, so I can't vouch for them. With a PDF for the print version, you can do whatever you like, but as Ken says, it's a good idea not go overboard. If you try to get fancy, you risk your book being close to unreadable on some device and nothing looks more amateurish than bad formatting. Things that often happen if these guidelines aren't followed: erratic shifts in font size and face strange indents so consecutive paragraphs "step" inwards paragraphs being centered wide gaps between paragraphs. The reason is that there are many ereaders out there, all different screen sizes, with different font support and defaults, and differing ability to handle symbol sets. (Sorry - I don't have a link to it handy.) If this all sounds like Greek, Amazon has a nice, simple (free) formatting guide which is pretty easy to follow, for converting a Word doc into HTML for uploading. (We only use bold and italics - not even super and subscripts.) Limit use of symbol characters (try to use HTML symbol codes) and in-line formatting. Use percents for indents and em's for margins. It's best to go with straight, simple HTML, if you know how to do that. ![]()
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