by Karen Powers
Type “Dedication”, hit enter and click on the Normal-button under the “Styles”-section found in the “Home”-tab.
You can now write to who or whom your book is dedicated to (if any).
After that is done (as seen in the picture), hit the “Enter”-key once and insert page break (which you should have learned now how to do exactly).
Feel free to also save (hold down CTRL-key and hit S-key and release CTRL-key afterwards) your progress after every step you successfully follow in this guide.
Step 7/9: Writing your very first chapter that is 100 % Kindle-ready by choosing Heading 1 in Styles, typing header name, pressing enter, writing your paragraphs and inserting a paragraph after the last character which is usually the dot, question-mark or exclamation-mark.
Alright! You are pretty comfortable now changing the Font size, aligning your cursor (and thus your written text) and inserting page breaks.
This means you are ready for what will take most time, namely, writing the content itself.
We will begin however in learning to creating a chapter-header that will work correctly when creating the Table of Contents later on, so you can avoid that beginner mistake I showed you in previous chapter.
As you have your cursor on a new page after the page break you did last, I want you to left-click on the “Heading 1”-style under the “Styles”-section found in the “Home”-tab.
When you have left-clicked on it, its surrounding turns yellow as you can see in this picture below:
BUT!
Something terribly wrong has occurred!
Can you see what has happened?
You were right if you found that the Font type turned to Cambria (Headings) which was really not what we wanted.
So, you will have to right-click with your mouse on the Heading 1-button, choose “Modify…” and change the Font type to Times New Roman and then left-click on the OK-button in that new window that pops up.
You can now write your very first chapter-header ever!
REMEMBER: You must always insert a page break after the last character in your last line in your last paragraph in each of your chapters and then choose Heading 1 in order for your Table of Contents to appear properly when you upload this to KindleStore.
When you have written your very first chapter-header, just press the “Enter”-key once.
Now, notice what happens to the cursor below your chapter-header:
It changed size! Look also at what style in the “Styles”-section that is highlighted yellow.
It is the Normal-style!
How great isn’t that?!
This will always happen after you have inserted a page break after the last character in the last line in the last paragraph in each of your chapters, providing that you have selected the Heading 1-style, written your chapter-header name and pressed the “Enter”-key afterwards.
Following that simple procedure will make it very easy for you to get the correct style after your chapter-headers and it will look great in your final Kindle eBook you upload later on!
Take a brief look at the picture below now and read the text inside it:
The text in this picture, that is from the actual eBook I will *almost* upload to the KindleStore, describes how paragraphs are created and the line-spacing between each paragraph and also exactly where the page break will be inserted for every chapter.
As the picture clearly shows, it is in the last paragraph’s last line right after the dot!
When you have your cursor exactly there, you insert the page break by going t o the “Insert”-tab and left-click with your mouse on the “Page Break”-button.
It should be no more than piece of cake for you at this moment of time!
While we’re in the step of actually writing the content itself, let me list for you what you CANNOT use when writing content.
These things will simply not be viewed in the uploaded Kindle eBook:
* Certain bullet lists
* Special fonts
* Header text
* Footer text
* Tables (only in the Kindle Fire 8 device)
* Images that doesn’t follow JPEG-format
What this list means to you is that you would be wasting your time if you were to use certain bullet lists to make your point, use special fonts because it might look nice, use header text with your company logo maybe, use footer text with copyright text, presenting certain things with tables because it looks usually better and inserting images in wrong formats.
The thing I want to address from this list is the last item, namely, inserting images using the JPEG-format (which by the way is the correct one).
When you insert images, please keep in mind that if you aim to reach a big audience, most of them do not use a full-colored Kindle device (e.g. Kindle Fire) so instead the pictures you insert will be viewed in a 16 shades of grey for the purpose of great contrast and clarity when viewed on the Kindle.
Thus, you always want to preview your Kindle eBook and check out so the pictures were placed correctly and look the way you want them to look.
To insert an image, first make sure its name ends with .JPEG (otherwise it will just not work correctly when uploading to Kindle).
Then you want to go to the “Insert”-tab and then click on the “Picture”-button (as seen in the picture below):
Then you just locate your .JPEG-file, select it clicking with your left mouse-button and then left-click with your mouse on the grey “Insert”-button (as seen in picture below):
Step 8/9: Inserting Table of Contents by placing the cursor before the first character of the first chapter-header name, then going to the “Reference”-tab, left-click on “Table of Contents”-button, then on “Insert Table of Contents” and uncheck the “Show page numbers”-box and check the “User hyperlinks instead of page numbers”-box and click OK.
Okay, since you understand how to insert page breaks, insert JPEG-images, change from Heading1 to Normal and vice versa, it is time to learn one of the last things before you actually upload your very first Kindle eBook that works 100 % correctly guarantee!
And that is the process of creating the Table of Contents that actually views all your added chapter-headers so people can navigate on your Kindle devices by clicking on your chapter-headers’ names viewed in the table of contents.
First off, begin with placing your cursor behind the first character of your chapter-header’s name (of your very first chapter):
Then you hit the “Enter”-key so everything goes down one line.
After that, place your cursor on the new lines that were created above everything else (and it should look something like this now):
Your cursor should be above your very first chapter-header you created in your eBook.
I will now present you to the last tab you must learn to use in Microsoft Word which is the “References”-tab (see picture below):
So, left-click on the “References”-tab and find the “Table of Contents”-button as seen in the picture above here.
Now, you will see many different tables and you want to left-click with your mouse on the label “Insert Table of Contents…”
When you do that, this kind of window pops up for you:
Here you want to do uncheck the “Show page numbers”-box and check the “Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers”-box (see picture above).
Under “General” you want “Formats:” to be “From template” and “Show levels:” to be set to at least 2.
Afterword you just left-click on the grey “OK”-button found in the bottom left in this window.
If everything is correctly done you should see your Table of Contents appear above your first chapter (as seen in picture below):
Now you want to use the “Delete”-key on your keyboard to move up your first chapter so it is right below your last table of contents item (like this):
Then insert a classic page break. You will now see that your first chapter has changed it style fr
om Heading 1 to Normal (see picture below):
You know what to do now: just keep the cursor where it is and left-click with your mouse on the “Heading 1”-button under the “Styles”-section found in t he “Home”-tab, and suddenly you get how it should look exactly (see picture below):
Now go up one page and right-click on one of the table of contents items and left-click with your mouse on the “Update Field”-option (as viewed below):
Here you can also save the document once again by holding down the CTRL-key on your keyboard while you press the S-key once and then release the CTRL-key.
Go to empty space just above your first table of contents item and type in “Table of Contents” (it will use Heading 1 so change it to Normal first) and then center-align the text and bold it use the B-button found under the “Font”-section in the “Home-“tab and you should get something that looks like this:
When we upload the book now it will jump directly to the first chapter:
This happens because Kindle devices understand where to begin if we have told it to where the document begins, where the cover is and where the table of contents is.
We must fix this last thing before we upload a disaster to KindleStore!
Step 9/9: Fixing the Table of Contents by inserting a Bookmark in front of the “T” (the first letter in Table of Contents) and for the Start and Cover as well and finally make it work with the free Kindle Previewer software by uninstalling the Windows Internet Explorer 9 program.
To make our Table of Contents work properly we need to get to know at least one more function in Microsoft Word, namely, inserting Bookmarks:
The bookmark-icons (like any item in Microsoft Word) gets smaller if your Microsoft Word document is smaller as well, like in my case as I am writing this book):
Nonetheless, we can see that the Bookmark-icon can be found in the “Insert”-tab and before you click on it you need to place the cursor exactly in front of the very first letter of the very first table of contents item (as below):
After that you click on the Bookmark icon (as seen in the pictures above) and a window will pop up where you will type the text “toc” in the “Bookmark name:”-field and then left-click with your mouse on the grey “Add”-button (see pictures below):
When you click on the grey “Add”-button this Bookmark-window will disappear but you can go back to it and see that the toc-bookmark has been added (see picture below):
It is very important that you have typed “toc” and not something else, and that you have placed your cursor in front of the very first item in the table of contents.
Kindle’s own navigation system (the “Go To”-inbuilt function in the Kindle devices), if you will, is done through bookmarks and it navigates differently with different bookmark-names.
There are two more bookmarks you need to insert:
* Cover (so you can navigate to your cover with the “Go To”-function)
* Start (so you can tell where the whole book start when opened)
Let us begin with the cover. As you can see below, our so called “cover” is text-based and if you would insert a bookmark by putting your cursor before the first “Y” in the word “Your” and then insert a bookmark, it would still not work (picture below shows text-based cover:)
What we need to do is to insert a true cover that is based on the file-format JPEG or JPG.
So, what I did was to remove the “Your Author Name” and the main and sub title for this book.
Then I went to the “Insert”-tab and clicked on the “Picture”-button and located my Microsoft Paint-created image (the image below is an exact copy and I just centered this text and saved it as a JPG-file from Microsoft Paint):
I select the image by left-clicking on it with my mouse (see picture below to see how you know you have selected it) and click in the “Insert”-tab and choose the “Bookmark”-button once more.
In the bookmark-window I type cover and click on “Add”, I go back to the bookmark-window again and see it was successfully added:
Now when you use the “Go To”-function on Kindle devices and click on the Cover-choice you will get back to this eBook cover I have made (although you probably will make a more real one).
Our last bookmark is where the eBook should start.
This is actually important to be careful with because I can insert the so called start-bookmark anywhere and the Kindle device-reader will then start there when you open up the eBook using a Kindle device:
In this picture the eBook jumps directly to Chapter 3 (although the heading isn’t apparent).
If I would click on the “Table of Contents”-function I would come to the Table of Contents (see picture below) and these bookmarks are really important to remembering inserting.
Because if your reader cannot jump immediately back to your table of contents, they will have to go back, page by page which could take dozens of minutes if you have hundreds of pages.
The longer it takes for your reader to navigate throughout your eBook, the more likely they will be to stop reading and maybe even ask for a refund!
So, we can easily avoid this threat to high profitability by inserting these “Go To”-bookmarks which I showed above how you do it.
Regarding where you want to put the “Go to Beginning” (which is known as the “start”-bookmark; see picture below), you can choose between having it in front the first letter in your copyright page or maybe in foreword.
If your eBook is mostly technique-based, like each chapter is it own technique, then I would recommend you insert the start-bookmark at the same place as your table of contents so your reader quickly gets an overview.
I choose to place my cursor in front of the first letter in the copyright page (see picture below) and I go to the Bookmark-button found in the “Insert”-tab:
What then happens when I upload the eBook and preview it, is that this is the very first page that I will see because of the start-bookmark (as seen in picture below):
Finally! The eBook is almost done. You have only one thing more to do before you upload it to the KindleStore.
For many people, following these instructions will not work because of one strange reason: Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).
When you upload your eBook to the KindleStore and use the Preview or download it as a MOBI-file (by left-clicking with your mouse on the “Download Book Previewer File”-link) it will not work if you have IE9 installed:
If you have IE9 installed and you use the free Kindle Previewer software on your MOBI-file you will get this error message when trying to directly navigate to the table of contents:
You get this error because for some reason, when you upload your book to the Kindle and open it with the Kindle Previewer, the table of contents bookmark does not work the way it should.
I have researched this issue on the Internet and found one guide that suggested to first use the free Mobipocket software (which is also great if you want to create eBooks for other devices than just Kindle) after you have uninstalled Windows Internet Explorer 9, I actually found it to work right after I just uninstalled IE9.
Here’s the even more strange part though: I use Mozilla FireFox when uploading so it is really strange that IE9 is responsible for this error.
Nonetheless, when you want to uninstall IE9 (in order to make your eBook work properly regarding the bookmarks) you go to Start -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features (or Programs – Uninstall a program) and click on the “View installed updates”-link (see picture below):
When you do that you will see all updates and then you can navigate yourself down to an update named “Windows Internet Explorer 9”.
Right-click on this item with your mouse and left-click with your mouse on the choice “Uninstall”.
You will have to restart your computer after this and suddenly your eBook will have workable table of contents bookmark in Kindle Previewer and when you preview through kdp.amazon.com.
Alright!
There you h
ave it!
These are the 9 simple steps in order to create a 100 % Kindle-ready eBook from scratch by using only Microsoft Word 2007 (or later; you can use Microsoft 2003 but the pictures were taken using Microsoft Word 2007).