Kindle Create! Is This the Answer to Your Formatting Woes?

I have been publishing novels to Kindle for seven years and formatting has always been a major concern because if you get it wrong it can completely spoil your book.

When I first started to publish to KDP, it took me on a massive learning curve. But I think I can safely say that, over time, I became a formatting whiz from whom other authors constantly asked advice. That resulted in me publishing my hard-earned knowledge in my self-help book Nuts & Bolts of Self-Publishing.

More recently I have become aware that the KDP software, Kindle Create, may have come of age. I tended to steer clear of it when it was at the beta stage but recently I gained the impression it was better established so I thought I would try it out. You can download Kindle Create here.

After I downloaded the software from KDP, I imported one of my crime novels into Kindle Create. It was relatively easy and immediately the file loaded it generated a table of contents as the .NCX file. That’s the TOC accessed through the ‘Go To’ command in a Kindle eReader, not the one at the beginning of the book, and is something that is often the bane of every author’s life when uploading a Kindle book. So, full marks to Kindle Create for that.

However, if you want a list of chapters at the beginning of your book, which is something I loathe and who wants to read a list of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and so on ad infinitum, then you will still need to include it in your Word file before import. The .NCX file generates automatically but the beginning TOC does not.

The layout of the software comprises a ‘Contents’ pane down the left-hand side. This shows you how your book is laid out, in parts and chapters. The middle pane is where your text goes and the right-hand pane is the ‘Text Properties’ pane where you access all your additional formatting needs.

The text in the imported file was added exactly the way I’d formatted it in Word but Kindle Create has some bells and whistles that allow you to enhance your formatting even further. Most of these are contained in the ‘Text Properties’ pane at the right-hand side. It is worth mentioning here that all your chapter titles whether that be Chapter 1, or a descriptive phrase heading, require to be formatted under ‘Chapter Title’ in the ‘Common Elements’ of the ‘Text Properties’ pane otherwise they will not appear in the .NCX table of contents. That, however, does not stop you editing the chapter title with a different font or size if you wish to.

Kindle Create has four theme templates to choose from. Whichever theme you choose will automatically add it to the entire book. However, apart from the default theme ‘Modern’ I did not particularly like the other themes. You will find the Theme icon at the top right of your screen in the menu bar. It sits alongside ‘Save’, ‘Preview’ and ‘Publish’.

Coming back to my imported file I didn’t really need to do much polishing to the book apart from checking that my ‘Other Books’ page was set out properly, my hyperlinks were working, and that the copyright notice and other little bits were the way I liked them. The book itself only needed about two tweaks. The first tweak I did was to reduce the size of the chapter heading, I thought the heading in the template was a bit too large. The second tweak I did was to ensure that the first paragraph in each chapter was tagged with the ‘Chapter First Paragraph’ setting in the ‘Common Elements’ section in the ‘Properties Pane’. This gave me a nice drop-down cap in the first sentence. Every element can be edited so you are not restricted to the defaults.

If your book has images, these can be imported along with the Word file, and you can add hyperlinks. You can insert block quotes and the software can lay out poems, something which formatters have always felt to be a challenge.

Once you are satisfied with the layout of your book, you can preview it using the ‘Preview’ command in the menu bar at the top right of your screen. You can choose to preview your book as it would appear in a tablet, an eReader or a phone, or all three if you wish.

I understand it is also possible to format print books with Kindle Create but this is at an early beta stage. I did not try out this aspect of the software.

One thing to take note of is that when you save a Kindle Create project it produces a .kcb file which has a blue icon. This is not the file you upload to KDP. Once you are satisfied with your formatted file, you must then publish it in Kindle Create by selecting the ‘Publish’ command at the top right corner of the menu bar. This produces the .kpf file (gold icon) which is the one you upload to KDP.

There are some negatives about Kindle Create. The main one is that it only produces files for Kindle. It does not produce epub files which are used by other eReaders such as Kobo. The other is that the themes are not as attractive as those used by Vellum, the Mac software equivalent. Vellum is sophisticated software capable of producing epub versions and print books but is only available for Mac computers and you do pay a hefty price for it. You can check it out here.

The main advantage of Kindle Create is that it is free software and does a good job of formatting for Kindle. If you do require epubs then the Kindle .kpf file can be converted to epubs in Calibre software, which is a free download, although you do have to enable the ‘KFX input’ plugin first. You can find Calibre here.

So, what did I think? Well, by the time I had finished testing Kindle Create I was so impressed by the ease of use and the output I formatted all of my Kindle books using the software. It’s well worth trying out, and it’s free. What more could you want?

Chris Longmuir

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