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When I was about eight or nine years old, my brother brought home a portable manual typewriter. It fascinated me, and thus began my love affair with typing.
I memorized every single one of the keys and learned to type rather quickly using only four fingers, the index and middle ones on either hand.
Later on, in my first typing class in high school, my teacher became very frustrated with me when I continued to exhibit the skills I had learned instead of placing all of my fingers on the keys in the manner she was trying to teach me.
“But it slows me down,” I insisted. “I already know where the keys are.”
She (God rest your weary soul Mrs. Chapman) very gently cupped my face between her hands and looked me dead center in the eyes.
“FORGET EVERYTHING YOU EVER KNEW!”
I thought about those five little words when I started trying to publish my first e-book, and decided they are the most important things I could tell any author attempting to do the same.
Especially the formatting part!
Save yourself a lot of trouble and set it up the right way from the beginning.
What is the right way?
Amazon has an excellent formatting guideline for MobiPocket files (which is the only thing they use). It can be found here.
Some of the things they don’t cover is what I’m going to talk about.
Formatting a Normal Paragraph: Click on Format. Select Style. Click on Format. Select Style. Click on Normal. Select Modify. Select Format. Select Paragraph.
You want to make sure the Alignment is set to Justified. Indent First line to 0.25 (or more if you so desire). Everything else is set to zero (0) except the Spacing After. You must change it to 12 pt if you want extra space between the paragraphs. That will put in a nice extra line to keep everything from running together, without having to insert the return key to separate them. (That is a no-no.) The line spacing is optional. Keep it single or change to 1.5. Do not use double. (FORGET EVERYTHING YOU EVER KNEW about double spacing.)
See (for example) the line spacing in this post. I didn’t add the extra return between my paragraphs. The back-end formatting took care of all that. Kudos to somebody at WordPress, who knows what they are doing!
More to follow, as we all learn…by doing.
Related articles
- Which is the best format for ebooks? | Ask Jack (guardian.co.uk)
- How to Customize Default Line Spacing in Microsoft Word 2007, 2010 (ghacks.net)
JUDE GARRISON 