Formatting question for producing an e-book on Amazon

February 27, 2016 1:34 PM

I'm turning my manuscript into an e=book and putting it on Amazon. The regular text is fine, but I have some columns with text in them, which makes those pages too wide to fit on the very narrow screen of an e-reader.

You can see it fine in landscape mode, but in portrait mode it's all screwy.

Is there anything I should know about how to fix this that I'm not seeing on the Amazon self-publishing website?

The only way I can think to fix this is to use a tiny tiny font to jam in all my words.

Note: using "columns" doesn't help.

posted by DMelanogaster to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

Have you searched on the KDP forum? (I wasn't sure if that was what you meant by the website.) They have a section devoted to formatting. My general impression has been "do everything you can to avoid columns," which I know isn't a helpful answer, but you may see a more helpful answer on the forum?
posted by mittens at 2:21 PM on February 27, 2016

Tables are bad news for Kindle. If at all possible, remove them. (See also section 9.5 in this document.) Is there a reason they need to be in columns (eg: tabular data)?

What software are you using to generate the content for the Kindle? There are a lot of ways to submit things to KDP, none of them particularly wonderful, but it might help us come up with a better solution.

Formatting anything beyond plain text for the Kindle is a bit of a dark art. You might try hitting up the KBoards Writer's Cafe for tips. (Registration required to search.) They also have a forum for people who offer formatting services if you want to bring in a pro. (I've used Polgarus Studio with excellent, affordable results.)
posted by Ookseer at 3:58 PM on February 27, 2016

Could you size the columns into a dimension that would work in either orientation, and then format it into an image using screenshot/snipping tool?
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:37 PM on February 27, 2016

I face this with Kindle books too. Tables with more than 2 or 3 columns won't look good on narrow Kindles.

If you don't mind some ugliness, you can reformat the table as text-- e.g. have lines like

text — big long text — some more text

Readable and ugly is better than pretty but unreadable.

If the table has a lot of columns but they're very short, I might turn it into graphics. But Kindle graphics aren't that high-res.

Other than that... try real hard to not have big wide tables. :P
posted by zompist at 9:41 PM on February 27, 2016

Response by poster: I think I'm going to have to redo these things so that they're not a matrix. Here's the current format (not my content: I'm just making this up to demonstrate):




HOW TASTE BECOMES MORE SOPHISTICATED

LITTLE KIDS TEENAGERS GROWNUPS

FISH fish sticks fish tacos salmon filet with dill

PUDDING Junket rennet custard frozen yogurt pannacotta


Ha! MetaFilter won't do it either!

Anyway, that's the idea -- a matrix -- except in the real manuscript there are maybe 8 words in each cell.

So maybe I have to do it like this:

FISH:

LITTLE KIDS: fish sticks
TEENAGERS: fish tacos
GROWNUPS: salmon filet

PUDDING:

(etc.)

It's sad, because I kind of love my matrices.

But a standard e-book format just isn't wide enough to display this type of content in the way I'd like.

Thanks for suggestions and info!
posted by DMelanogaster at 6:43 AM on February 28, 2016

Response by poster: sorry to sit, but now I have another question that's arisen from realizing the limitations of the Kindle (e-reader) format: I wonder if I have to put my manuscript in this format at all. This is a self-help manual in the field of psychology. I just wonder if I shouldn't self-publish in a different format that is larger by nature (like a pdf that looks more like 8 1/2 x 11 paper), so that my matrices and (long) questionnaire look better.

This is basically why I'm asking here and not on the self-publishing forums: I like the well-rounded advice given by AskMeFites. Not just "how to," but "what's a good idea?" So-- in this crazy modern world of self-publishing, MUST one put a self-published book into "Kindle" format?
posted by DMelanogaster at 6:50 AM on February 28, 2016

You can sell in multiple formats, you know. My books sell very well on Kindle, I sure wouldn't give up that platform. It just takes a day or two to prepare the Kindle source document.

I'll say though that PDFs look fantastic on iPads. :) I am still learning how the Apple publishing process works; it's annoyingly harder than Kindle.
posted by zompist at 1:59 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

The traditional answer of only mediocre suck is "image." So, you can do your matrix tables as images. But given that your examples are not tabular data, I would yes, remove them from tables entirely. Tables are not native to the format.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:16 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]