How to Format Your EBooks for Amazon's Kindle

While it is worth to publish your eBooks through Amazon Kindle, you may find it difficult to meet the right formatting. Formatting should not be disparaged since it allows your works to be accessible on Kindle and other devices with a Kindle app installed. When your book is in the right format, it can be accessed through PC's, Macs, Androids, Blackberry phones, iPhones, and iPads.

Acceptable Kindle eBook Formats 

Several different formats are acceptable on Kindle, namely: Microsoft Word (.doc or.docx), ePub (.epub), Plain text (.txt), HTML (.htm,.html or.zip), Adobe PDF (.pdf), Rich Text Format (.rft), and MobiPocket (.mobi or.prc).

Though it is okay to upload Microsoft Word documents to Kindle, you had better not. There's unreadable extra coding in Word documents. Unless it can be read by Kindle readers, it will mess up your formatting entirely: screwing up your graphics and misaligning your fonts.

It is recommended that you use Rich Text (.rft) or plain text (.txt) because both do not contain any extra code that can make matters worse for the Kindle reader.

Pictures in Your Books

If you want to attach some pictures to your books, be sure they are in .jpg format. They should be aligned in the center only and inserted directly. Although Kindle device itself can only show images in grayscale today, devices with Kindle apps can show ones in full color.

Some other things you need to keep in mind are you should make no headers or footers, no bullet points, and no strange characters that may be unreadable by the device. However, it is alright to have bold-types, italics and indentations. If you want to indent, use 'indent' under Paragraph Settings instead of tab key. Do not forget to add a page break at the end of each chapter, unless they will all run together.

You had better make the table of contents at the last moment of your Kindle formatting since the page numbers will be different from those of your original document.

Prior to uploading, scroll through the book slowly one last time. Observe if there’s anything funny or weird. Check if there are mistaken page breaks or tabs that you forgot to take out.

Using MobiPocket Creator

MobiPocket Creator helps you do the formatting much more easily. You can get the program for free from MobiPocket.com. This program converts HTML files into .prc -- an eBook format. It changes your HTML file directly into Kindle-ready eBooks, which means one more step (converting.doc file to HTML, then HTML to .prc) but eliminates a lot of the formatting hassles.

Once you publish your first Kindle eBook, you'll get to know which files work best for you. Be prepared with the acceptable Kindle eBook format. Don’t be so uneasy if you have to do a little re-formatting. You’ll soon get used to it. And if you're going to be publishing a lot (which you should be!), you had better download MobiPocket Creator to help you work faster and more easily.