Support for Indie Authors discussion

Has anyone ever experienced random, excessive spacing between words when uploading to Amazon? There doesn't seem to be any pattern; it just occurs once every couple of pages or so, and is usually an entire line. I've tried retyping the line and then uploading again, but that rarely works. If anyone has any experience with this, please help me out.

Hi Bill, Did you upload your Amazon document from MS Word? I find I often get Word gremlins that "remember" previous formatting, messing up my amazon documents. I hated the formatting problems so much, I no longer use Word to type my documents. I still find I often must go in and add tabs or italicize words that lost their slant.

It does indeed sound like Word gremlins. I go the long way, cutting/pasting all my book into Notepad++ and doing the entire HTML formatting there, then I run it through Kindle Preview to convert it to mobi.

Much more involved but no gremlins.

Yes, I use Word. I'm not exactly tech savvy, so simply uploading a word document is kind of my only option. What are the other options? Or (and this is preferable) how can I defeat these gremlins?

So copy/paste to Notepad, and then upload-tweak-upload-tweak, just like do with Word, but less gremlin presence?

You'd have to type a really "clean" original document with no previous formatting. No special fonts or spacing. Nothing fancy.Or you could find someone who converts docs to ebooks at a reasonable price and have them deal with the gremlins.

I have no idea if mine is "clean" or "fancy"; but I do know that i'm definitely not paying anybody to do it. It's a short story and has no chapters. Seems like I should be able to figure it out. Damn gremlins.

Bill, try Sigil (free, open-source software). I use it to edit HTML and CSS, but it also has a "non-techie" mode where you can hide all the underlying code. If you copy and paste from Word into Sigil, it strips out all the garbage (at least, on a Mac; I haven't used the Windows version).

You can upload the ePub file directly to Amazon's KDP dashboard.

Hi Bill. I use Word as well and there are a few things you can do without having to learn a new system. What this sounds like to me is an issue with the justification. Is the book live or still in the set up process?

Bill wrote: "So copy/paste to Notepad, and then upload-tweak-upload-tweak, just like do with Word, but less gremlin presence?"

It's much more complicated that that. Since you're not really tech savvy you probably don't want to pursue this avenue.

@Christina, One story is live and still has some spacing issues. It's not TOO bad, but enough to annoy me. I also have one that will be live soon--same issues. I would definitely prefer to continue operating in simple, dumb dumb mode if possible.

Okay, I just had a peek at the look inside. It was uploaded as a left aligned file. Kindle automatically justifies the text for the mobi file. The main thing to keep in mind is that any formatting done in Word needs to be done through the templates and not manually. Try changing your text from left aligned to justified. When you do this, you may see huge gaps. If they are at the end of a paragraph, they should be easy to fix. Just retype and the words should look normal. If they aren't at the end of the paragraph, it might just be a situation where the words on that line are too big to fit properly. If that's the case, it doesn't really matter what you do to the document. Try changing the font size in the kindle or kindle app to see if that changes things.

And if none of that helps, PM me and I will send you the template I set up for my kindle books.

Ok, I'll give it a shot. Thanks!.

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Bill wrote: "Has anyone ever experienced random, excessive spacing between words when uploading to Amazon? There doesn't seem to be any pattern; it just occurs once every couple of pages or so, and is usually a..."

I had the same problem, neither my brother (who's all about computers) nor I could figure out how to fix the dang thing, but since it was only two lines we just left it as is. It's nice to finally know that there are ways to fix it.

This happened to me too. I use Createspace and upload a PDF format to it however, it transfers the same format over to Amazon and it doesn't look good and does exactly what your describing. Spaces or it's all clustered together. What you have to do is just as a few have been saying, you have to go into Amazon and upload it as a html, sometimes it may have a few minor spaces and what not but it looks alot better than it would be for PDF.

There is a topic here that went into this in quite a bit of detail -- maybe more than you want. But here it is, just in case: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I believe there is a link in that thread to a short, free Amazon publication that describes how to format a document and create an HTML file for uploading to KDP.

And heed Christina's advice about not doing manual formatting in Word; that leads to a mess.

Owen wrote: "There is a topic here that went into this in quite a bit of detail -- maybe more than you want. But here it is, just in case: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...-..."

Nice, thanks for sharing Owen. It's one of those things people may be unaware of until a reader kindly messages you and points it out and your jumping on the site first chance you get to fix it up.

Justin wrote: "Nice, thanks for sharing Owen. It's one of those things people may be unaware of until a reader kindly messages you and points it out and your jumping on the site first chance you get to fix it up."

Quite right. The preview function on KDP is pretty good, but the problem, of course, is that it would take ages check your book thoroughly for every device it emulates to find out the things went wonky 60% of the way through. Setting up a reliable workflow to produce a robust file to upload to KDP is well worth it, even if it means climbing a learning curve.

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I use Smashwords style guide. It is very easy to use and detailed once used correctly it will squash those gremlins.