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HOW TO CREATE A KINDLE BOOK
Ludwik Kowalski, Professor Emeritus, MSU
(November 11, 2011)
1) Teachers know that teaching is the most effective way of learning. I am creating a Kindle book. Let me share what
I have learned so far. Hopefully, others will benefit from my experience. To become a published writer one must have
an Amazon account. It can be created by going to this website and
clicking the "Sign Up" button. This amounts to obtaining an ID and a password,
needed to "Sign In" at later times, for example to upload the book to be published. Writing a book is
likely to be a long process. But publishing it is usually very fast, as shown in [1,2]. The email address of
Kindle Customer Service is
kindle-cs-support@amazon.com
2) The book to be submitted can be in one of several formats; my preference is to submit it as a Word file.
Why? Because this format is acceptable by Kindle publishers, and because I am familiar with this word processor
(version 2008 for Mac). What follows is a skeleton for a simple manuscript. A book is usually subdivided into sections
which I decided to call parts--a part must begin by an inserted page brake. The skeleton shows that the book consist
of six parts. Three of these parts are chapters whose titles will be Youth, Traveling the World, and Coming Home. The
first two parts and the last are extremely short; they have only one line each.
-----------------------------------
Remembering My Past
-----------------------------------------------------
Ludwik Kowalski
-----------------------------------------------------
Youth
..........<==== Content of this part (many paragraphs)
----------------------------------------------------
Traveling The World
..........<==== Content of this part (many paragraphs)
----------------------------------------------------
Coming Home
..........<==== Content of this part (many paragraphs)
--------------------------------------------------------------- ----------
Thank you for reading my first Kindle book
----------------------------------------------------------------
3) Parts in a Kindle book must begin with page breaks. I will assume that a reader of this
handout knows how to perform basic Word tasks, such as insertion of a page break, choice of font size, etc.
The bold letters, in my two red illustrations, are used to distinguish comments from content
of the manuscript. Note that my first part contains only one line--the book title. Likewise, my second part has
nothing but the author's name. In the next skeleton (see below) the title and the name of the
author are in the first part. Blank lines are used to vertically position text, in anticipation of how it will
be displayed on small Kindle devices.
4) Here are some additional details. Following the advice found in [3], I decided to use the font Calibri (size 16)
for names of chapters, and the font Times New Roman (size 12) for the content of chapters. Paragraphs in each chapter
must be indented. Parts of the content can be italicized or bolded, for emphasis, if needed.
A picture can be inserted (from a jpg file) by using the dedicated Word command "Picture," from the Insert menu.
Keep in mind that inserting pictures by dragging them into the text is likely to create problems, when the Word document
is later converted into the Kindle format. Neither the height nor the width of a picture should exceed 1200 pixels.
-------------------------
prt1
Remembering My Past <=== BOOK title
by Ludwik Kowalski
-------------------------------------------------------------------
prt2 <================= This is a bookmark
Table of Contents <======= Title for this chapter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2 <=============== These are my three hyperlinks, for jumping to destinations.
Chapter 3
-----------------------------------------------------------------
prt3 <=================Bookmark
Youth < ================Title for Chapter 1
......... <============= Content of this part (many paragraphs)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
prt4
Traveling The World <==== Title for Chapter 2
..........<============= Content of this part (many paragraphs)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
prt5
Coming Home <========= Title for Chapter 3
.......... <=============== Content of this part (many paragraphs)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for reading my book <== Nither bookmark nor title are needed here.
----------------------------------------------------------------
5) Let me address the topic of Table of Contents (TOC). The first skeleton shown above does not contain the TOC. This is
acceptable in some books but not in others. Creating a document with an active TOC was a problem for me. But I finally
succeeded, following the description found in [3]. To accomplish this I had to learn about the use of bookmarks and hyperlinks
in Word. A hyperlink is an underlined clickable word or phrase. A reader can click on it and jump to another place of the same
document. A bookmark is a target destination for a hyperlink. What follows is another skeleton; it contains bookmarks, such
as prt1, prt2, prt3, etc. and a new part, named "Table of Contents." Note that each part has a bookmark, immediately
below its line brake. Titles of my three chapters, in Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, are below the bookmarks.
How does the second skeleton differ from the first? (a) Blank lines were inserted in the first part, which shows
the book title and the author's name. This has nothing to do with the TOC. (b) Each part now begins with a bookmark, such as
prt1 and prt2. The bookmark of the second part, containg the TOC, is prt2. The next three lines, in this part, display
hyperlinks, in this case the phrases: Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. I will elaborate on this a little later.
The TOC part of a book with ten chapters would have ten hyperlinks, associated with ten chapters.
6) How can a typed word be turned into a bookmark in Word? How can a typed word or phrase be turned into a hyperlink? Most
people using Word do not know how to answer these two questions. This is not surprising; neither bookmarks nor hyperlinks
are used in common short documents. But this is not true for long documents, such as books, annual reports, etc. The above
two questions are answered in [4].
7) My bookmarks appear below pagebreaks (dashed lines in illustrations). I named them prt1, prt2, prt3, etc. The name of
each bookmark must be unique, in a given book. Each name must be a single word; the first character must be a letter. To
turn a typed name into a bookmark I proceeded as follows. First I selected/highlighted a name, such as prt3. Then I
went to the "Insert" menu and choose the "Bookmarks..." command. This always brings a dialog box in
which already-created (if any) bookmarks are displayed. In the field "bookmark name" I typed the name of the bookmark,
such as prt3. Then I checked the "hidden bookmarks" box and pressed the ADD button. Other typed names were converted into
bookmarks in the same way.
8) Likewise, hyperlinks, in the TOC chapter, were first typed as ordinary phrases--in my case they were: Chapter 1, Chapter 2,
and Chapter 3. To turn a phrase Chapter 1 into a hyperlink I selected it and used the "Hyperlink..."
command from the "Insert" menu. This command always brings a dialog box containg three text fields; they are
labeled: "anchor" (bottom), "link to" (top), and "display" (middle). Knowing that Chapter 1
begins in the third part, I typed prt3 in the bottom text field. The other two text fields were filled at once automatically;
Chapter 1 appeared in the middle field and #prt3" appeared in the top field. The process was terminated by pressing
the "OK" button (in the dialog box of the hyperlink command). Two other hyperlinks were created in the same way.
Hyperlink phrases became underlined. I saved the Word document and verified that links worked properly. By clicking on
Chapter 2, for example, I was able to jump to the second chapter of my book, without scrolling.
9) Why didn't I place the bookmark into the last part, when it was created? Because I knew that no hyperlink would
be pointing to that location. What is the purpose of the prt1 and prt2 bookmarks, in the first two parts? They were
created because I was thinking about creating superlinks for jumping to these parts. But these superlinks have not
been created, so far. I can create as many bookmarks as I wish, in anticitation of future needs. Note that a bookmark
must exist in order to create a hiperlink pointing to it.
REFERENCES
1) click to go to that website
2) click to go to that website
3) click to go to that website
4) click to go to that website
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