How to EASILY format a Kindle Ebook and Paperback book using Microsoft Word

in today's video i'm gonna be walking you through step-by-step how to format your manuscript properly for your ebook and your paperback book for amazon kindle direct publishing what is going on guys my name is dane if you're new here welcome to the channel on this channel i talk all about self-publishing books on amazon online entrepreneurship and just lifestyle in general so if that kind of thing interests you make sure you subscribe hit the like button and hit the notification bell so you know when i post new videos um in today's video it's gonna be a pretty simple one and like i said in the intro it's gonna be for beginners or i think i said in the title or something like that it's a beginner's method for formatting your manuscript for your ebook and your paperback book for amazon kindle direct publishing okay there's not gonna be any advanced tactics in here so if you're looking for like some superstar looking manuscript and stuff this isn't really the video for that but this is gonna be the perfect video for beginners who are just getting into it and you're having problems with properly formatting your manuscript so it looks good when amazon prints it in your paperback book or when someone downloads it on their kindle device and reads it through their kindle or their ipad or something like that okay so let me show you exactly how to do it very simple uh pretty straightforward and i'll be walking you through step by step here but i want to go over a few things before we jump into the actual tutorial portion of this video okay so like i said we're talking about two types of manuscripts you're talking about your ebooks and your paperbacks uh manuscripts for your books okay so in the e-books these are obviously digital products and they are aka the kindle form of your book okay a paperback isn't called a kindle version of your book the ebook is the kindle version of your book for kdp okay these are usually priced between 99 cents and 9.99 and then on the other side of the spectrum we have paperback books okay and for me personally paperback books are where i make most of my money when it comes to nonfiction um if you're in fiction you might make more off of ebooks and page reads but that's a whole nother thing but for when it comes to paperback books these are physical products these are aka the money maker like i said and these are priced between 799 and 24.99 totally dependent on your niche and stuff like that okay so key elements for ebooks okay i'll be showing you this in a second but i want to go through the main sections that are going to be in your ebook and then i'll tell you about the ones that are going to go into your paperback book but they are very similar so for ebooks first thing we got is obviously the title page then we've got a disclaimer and then we have a table of contents which is hyperlinked okay so i'll be talking about the main differences in a second but the table of contents in an e-book or the kindle version of your book is hyperlinked um four is uh the introduction and body chapters so that's pretty straightforward and then the conclusion okay um you can also throw in things like funnels and stuff that i can go before your your table of contents to get people's emails but i'm not be going over that today that's a little bit different of a topic so i just want to go over the general way that we're going to be formatting and then in the end we have our resources section or a references section okay when it comes to our paperback books we have some different dimensions that you can actually format them too and amazon actually provides um a full list of pre-form or pre-dimensioned i guess you could call it word documents for you to download off of their website and i'll link that down below and it's where you can download a five by eight manuscript for a five by eight size book or a six by nine size manuscript for a six by nine size book and there's tons of other ones as well but these are just the most popular ones that i've used five by eight and six by nine and again i'll link that down below so you can download those pre-dimensioned i guess formatted books or manuscripts for word and you can work off of those when you're formatting your book what i'll be showing you today is a five by eight example so the sections in uh paperback books are relatively the same as ebooks with a few general tweaks okay in the paperback books we have a table of contents that is numbered and not hyperlinked so there's no links directing people to each page because obviously you can't click a link in a physical book so there's got to be page numbers for them to have an idea for where to flip to to get to that certain chapter and there's going to be some blank pages okay so in our ebooks we're not really worried about leaving blank pages in our paperback books if you've ever flipped through a paperback book you've seen there's blank pages between like a table of contents and the first chapter and stuff like that okay so a couple of small differences not a whole lot of difference and again the main difference are blank pages table of contents is numbered and the dimensions of it matter so five by eight for a five by eight size book six by nine for a six by nine size book when it comes to ebooks there's no like size you just kind of use a blank word document and you're completely fine here's the two kind of side by side so you get a better idea of what they look like so on the left we have an ebook one and that you can see the table of contents isn't numbered there's no page numbers it's just hyperlinked they're blue like that so people can click on them and go directly to uh that section in the book on the other hand we have the paperback one which is numbered for people to reference the number and go to that certain section in the book and you can see it's also a lot taller and skinnier that's because it's formatted to that five by eight size okay the e-book on the other hand is just a blank word document doesn't matter how wide it is and stuff okay and also you can see at the bottom there's a page number number five there okay okay so formatting yourself let's take a quick look at how you can effectively do the formatting for both versions of your books yourself all right so let's jump into this so first things first i think i'm gonna go over the paperback version and then i'll show you how to do everything for the ebook version because it's very similar and it's just a few little small tweaks okay so i've made this example for you guys it's just like a hydroponic gardening guide example it's just a random book and you can see that the pen name is just john doe okay just just filler so you guys have an idea for what it would look like in a word document okay so the first thing that i did was go to that website down below i've linked it and you can go and download the 5x8 manuscript of the 6x9 manuscript there's also tons of other sizes but for me personally if you're making like a regular traditional book five by eight or six by nine tend to be the best and just to give you an idea for amount of words and pages if you're making a thirty thousand word book and it's five by eight generally speaking it'll be around 150 to 160 pages six by nine any book that i've made that six by nine that's 30 000 words it's usually like 120 to 150 depends on how many pictures you have in there as well but that's the general size that we're talking so as you can see on the screen here again this is the paperback version and you can see the different sections okay so let's go through the different sections of the paperback version so we have our title page and then after a title page i usually like to put a blank page here and i'll be showing you how to do that in a second and then we have a copyright page and that's just going to be a legal and disclaimer notice for people to look at if they need it they have a blank page again and then our table of contents is down here and i'll be showing you how to make that in a second as well and then i'll usually put two blank pages and then the first chapter is going to be on page eight okay and that can vary between what kind of books you have and what your style is you could obviously only have one blank page there and then just put um and put the introduction on page seven whatever you want to do but for me and then again the rest of my chapters are below that and then i have a conclusion down here and i have my references section at the very very bottom all right and as you can see it's just filler text there's no actual text in this book but that's just a good way of showing you how to do it okay those are the main sections of this before i start anything though i will usually go up here and i will click this paragraph p looking thing and this is going to show all the different sections that are formatted and like the different spaces and all that kind of thing this is what it just gives you an idea for where everything is because these are invisible if you don't have them okay and you'll notice there's things called page breaks everywhere which i'll be showing you how to do in just a second the way that i make these blank pages everywhere so you don't if you don't want your uh book to be all messy like this and like no blank pages and stuff what you need to do for me on mac i will press command or sorry i'll i'll go command enter okay and that's going to make a blank page for me it's going to skip everything else so everything that gets typed on this page won't show up it's just going to pop up on this page here okay and even if this page continues down to the next page if i go oops let's go command enter again get done on the next page if i go command i just press enter it'll keep going down and it'll automatically make another blank page because that's a page break okay a page break basically means we're making a blank page we don't want any more text from that certain section to show up continuously on okay so i'm just gonna go undo here okay so that's how we're gonna make those blank pages it's very easy and uh you just gotta go command and enter on mac i think on pc it would be ctrl enter so that's how you're gonna do it and you can see i do that for all the end of my chapters just to make them separated you don't want a chapter heading to be at the bottom of like the end of the chapter before it okay you want to keep it clean and if you've seen chapters or you've seen the chapter but before they always start on a new page so for example this chapter here how to select the best hydroponic system you definitely want it to start on the next page you don't want it at the end of this chapter here the various types of hydroponic systems okay so what you want to do again command enter and i'll just take it right to the next page and generally speaking i'll make the heading centered on the page like that whoops i'll make it centered and then i'll just hit enter a few times and i'll make sure that it's like not at the very top so it's kind of halfway down that's usually the way that i like to do that okay another thing to note is with your text um so when you get your text from a writer if your writer didn't format the book or whatever you didn't you asked them and they didn't do it and you have to do this kind of thing manually yourself like i'm doing right now take the text from them and just copy and paste it into here and you want to make sure that the text that you paste is centered and it's like that squared look i don't know what it's called but you can see all this text is squared off i don't know what to call it but it's basically this option up here you don't want it to be like to the left or to the right or centered like that you want it to be centered and squared so make sure it's page width and it's centered like that it looks a lot more professional and uh you'll just get an idea for how that looks in terms of fonts i always use uh garamond or like times new roman those all work just fine uh you can use like calibri or ariel whatever you want to do but personally for me i think and george is pretty good too garamond georgia and times new romans seem to work the best in size 12. that's usually what i'll do for a five by eight size book if you're moving into a six by nine size book and you want maybe more pages you want it to be easier to see go to a size 13 or 14 font totally up to you okay so that is the font the next thing i want to talk about is the uh um headings up here okay footers and headings okay so page numbers and the headings you'll see at the top of my pages i have on one page it'll say the author name and then on the next page it'll say the book title okay so in order to do that double click at the very top and it'll open up this header section if you wanted to go between your author and your title of your book looks good in my opinion you could just do the title of the book so the entire thing but i think you have the title of the book and then the author on the next page it looks good um in order to do that you got to do different odd and even page if i unclick that you'll see it just goes straight to hydroponics hydroponic hydroponics every page i don't know that's kind of boring in my opinion if you go different on even you can add in the author name on one and then you can have the hydroponics gardening guide on the next one title and i'll just do the title for this section i won't do my subtitle all right and i also want to make sure my diff my first page isn't clicked because i don't want it on my title page a heading okay so that is how i'm going to do that for my um headers and and then in terms of footers down here instead of going through that section i'm going to go up to the top here and go insert this is for example if your book doesn't have page numbers already in it the manuscript you're going to go to insert at the top and go to page numbers and then you can just click where you want them to be i'll usually do bottom of the page alignment i'll usually do the center some people do the right side left side it's kind of personal preference doesn't really matter what you do and then at the bottom here you can choose uh where you want to just do continue from previous section click enter and we should be good okay so it's going to enter in those page numbers at the bottom of each page so in my opinion that looks good nice and simple easy to do so that's how you do the heading and the footer sections and those will continue on all the way to the end of the book see page 57 at the back here okay and it looks messy right now because of all these p things if i unclick it it'll look a lot cleaner okay but i'm gonna click it just so you i have an idea for where everything is on the page okay last thing i want to talk about is the table of contents okay so this is definitely the area where people struggle with the most they don't know how to make them so this is for the paperback version i'll show you how to do the ebook version in just a second but in terms of a paperback version we want them to be numbered and wanting to direct people directly to them so i'm gonna make this heading here and make it a table of contents but before i make the table of contents what you need to do is make sure that all of the headings in your document are headings okay and what i mean by that is going through and you can make you make the the copyright one if you want but i'm gonna start with my introduction highlight the introduction text and make sure one of these guys is clicked okay and what we're gonna do is click on this one and it's already formatted to that font but if you're gonna click on a different one it's going to format it to a different font and in the version that you get it might do that for you so let me just show you how to fix that so you want to make sure before i show you how to do that you want to make sure all of the chapter headings and titles are headings like they actually are highlighted when you highlight it it shows this box around this guy okay so for example if i go down to my chapter 2 here it's highlighted again if i go down to this one it's highlighted again so you want to make sure all of these chapters are headings okay i'm just gonna make sure i think they all are all ready see if the references is it is okay so if i weren't to click that then my table of contents wouldn't work properly when i make it so you wanna make sure that's clicked but what i was saying is you want to make sure that the font is congruent with all the fonts down here so if you want garamond to be your main font and when you click on this it might turn into calibri and that doesn't look very good you want to be garamond and title and you want it to be garamond throughout the entire book so when i click on heading if you right-click it you can go modify you can name it whenever you want heading 1 whatever right here is where you can adjust the font so for example it might have changed it to calibri by default when you did it make sure garamond is clicked the right size for the heading bolded and that's going to apply the exact same thing to all of the headings you just did so they're all going to be bolded they're all going to be 14. they're all going to be garamond centered and i'm going to make sure i'm going to go add the template add to quick list style and automatically update and click okay and all of them are going to change to that automatically okay so that way you don't have headings in calibry and then text and garamond for your chapters all right that's how you make the headings so once you've made the headings you got them all chosen go back to your table of contents and what you're going to do go up here go to insert we're going to go down to index and tables i'm going to go to table of contents and i'm going to go from template and levels is gonna be if you have like subheadings or something like that you can have different levels of chapters but for us we're just gonna do the chapter till this is the beginner's tutorial i'm not gonna go too in depth i'm gonna choose one layer or one level i'm gonna go show page numbers right line page numbers and i'm not gonna click this one hyperlinks because again this is a paperback version people aren't clicking on a hyperlink to get to a certain section of my book they're just referencing the page numbers okay and i think no i was gonna say you could edit the font here but we'll do that after okay so once you have all that set up click ok it's going to spit out a nice little table of contents here and you can see i had john doe as a heading by accident so i shouldn't have had it as a heading but that's why it popped up there that gives you an idea of if you choose the heading it's going to pop it up in your table of contents so i'm just going to easily um remove that from it and it also made my tail of contents part of the table of contents so i'm going to remove that as well and we're going to start it from our introduction okay and you can see it made the font calibri so i'm going to go ahead and highlight the entire thing and i'm going to go garemond okay so now we've got garamond there i'm gonna click back so it's all on one page and i'm gonna bold it all too because that'll look better okay so now you see all the page numbers are in correlation with the chapter headings so if i go to page 13 this chapter should start on that chapter on that page learn the meaning of gardening page 13. okay that is how you make the page chapters it's very easy and one thing to note um you can see it made this blank page here so i'm going to click back oh it must have taken away my i think it took away my chapter heading by accident but one thing that i want to know is if you do change the there it is i don't know it was hiding for some reason if you do change the page that a certain chapter is on so for example if i go backspace here and make the introduction on a different page than it was wow it's really messing up right now sorry word is so finicky sometimes that it's annoying but i'm going to make that blank page there so there's one blank page after my table of contents you could do two and start the introduction on page eight you can see my table of contents went away okay so i'm gonna make it again by going uh index tables table of contents one not gonna use hyperlinks boom i'm gonna pop it in there and you're gonna see it's gonna update for me and again it pushed my introduction to the next page so again it's a bit finicky and it's going to mess around with your stuff it's just going to take a few tries and kind of playing around with it but for the most part you have an idea of how it works it's not too difficult and i'm going to highlight all this again and i'm going to go you can go if you want to use a keyboard shortcut instead of using up top here to go bold i can go command b it'll make it bold and then i'm going to choose garamond again and it's going to look nice and clean like that okay boom i probably want a space between my heading and that so it's fine it goes on the next page not a big deal okay and if you ever change the um pages again this is what i was trying to show you you can go like this and go update field and then it'll update all the page numbers so for example if i deleted one of these blank pages and i move the introduction on to page eight since it says page nine here if i go update it'll change it to page eight on the on the table of contents okay so that is pretty much it for when it comes to your paperback uh formatting again if the writer doesn't format it for you take their writing uh copy it paste it into here and make your different sections for your chapters don't forget to use page breaks add in the headings add in the um heading at the top the footer at the bottom make your table of contents out of the heading up here by clicking right clicking or you can go insert at the top index and tables and table of contents one level and pop it in there don't use hyperlinks okay easy as that all the different sections and everything are laid out there i will include this as a download on the video so you can download it and get it on your computer for example okay quickly let me show you the ebook version okay so ebook version again they're not sized to like six by nine or five by eight so don't have to worry about that but again same sections table or title page all that stuff you don't have to use a heading if you don't want you could but i don't really do it i just use it for my paperbacks same pages no blank pages again i didn't include example text on here because i didn't need to but all we really want to focus on is having those page breaks between each page so i don't want the introduction at the bottom of my table of contents i want it to be if i go command and enter it'll put it back down there and i'll make a page break okay and you can click this p button again to make sure and see where your page breaks are you can see they're all labeled here okay um and just make sure they're all headings once again okay so we got heading one heading one and make sure they're all the same heading i should have said that in the paperback one okay and all the way down conclusion these are all heading one and then when we make our table of contents we're gonna click up here i'm gonna go insert index and tables and i'm going to go use hyperlinks don't show the page numbers because it's the kindle version there's no pages it depends what size the person kindle is the amount of pages in your book could be completely different on a small kindle compared to a big kindle device for example okay so you don't need page numbers all we need is hyperlinks instead of page numbers okay replace the table of contents apparently there's a payload contents there already and you're gonna see this tiny little thing pop up but it's clickable so when i click it it's gonna take me directly to that certain section in the book okay nice and easy and i'm just going to make it fit to the certain formatting that i have going on i'm going to make it garamond all right what what font am i using here garamond 18. so i'm gonna highlight the whole thing command b make it bold and i'm probably just gonna add in spaces between the two just to make it look better because i don't like how spaced out we are right now and again if you want to test it out um you can click it and it'll take you directly to that spot to make them look more like links i would probably turn them into blue text just like this okay so now when someone sees that when they're going through your book it looks like a link they'll click it and they'll take them directly to that certain chapter or certain section of your book okay so that is how i properly format my book obviously keep in mind there are tons of different ways you can do this that was just the beginner's way of doing it and that will get you ready for kindle direct publishing when you upload those files to uh when you're uploading your book okay so one thing i want to mention if you feel confused and you still don't want to do this there are outsourcing methods and similar to the many other areas of publishing we can outsource the formatting of our book one of the best services for this kind of thing is called ultimate book formatting and it's done by my buddy ed and he is the man when it comes to this he uses a advanced program called vellum to format books and all that stuff so he is an absolute pro and i can get the job done effectively and efficiently and if you're interested in outsourcing your formatting of your book in the kindle and ebook or kindle and paperback version of it his service is linked down below you can click it and you'll see there is a code down there you can use the code dane to get a little bit of a discount off of his service okay so that is formatting your book on kindle direct publishing if you want to learn more about publishing in general you want to learn how to publish your first book not just format it but make the book description make the cover choose your niche pick the right keyword all that kind of stuff there is a free program down below called publisher startup which is 100 free don't to pay anything you can join it and i'll teach you all the ins and outs to publishing books on amazon okay hopefully you enjoyed this one um that is pretty much it i don't want to ramble on too long if you want to download those two uh documents i had in the video they will be linked down below in the description uh hopefully you enjoyed it if you did like it drop a like subscribe to this channel hit the notification bell so you know when i post new videos other than that that is pretty much it i try to post videos one to two times per week so hopefully you enjoyed this one and i hope to see you in the next one peace [Music] you

Channel: Dane McBeth Publishing

Views: 210,122

Keywords: kindle publishing, amazon kindle publishing, audible acx, how to publish a book, amazon kdp 2020, kindle direct publishing, kindle direct publishing 2020, how to make an audiobook, how to self publish a book, how to self publish, low content books, kdp low content, dane mcbeth, how to make money online, kdp, kdp publishing tutorial, kindle direct publishing tutorial, Amazon kdp, amazon kdp tutorial, how to format a book in word, format kindle ebook, format in microsoft word

Id: ZWEHIcV0MTU

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020