TEMPLATES

I'm in the process of turning my Kindle-making posts into a short How-to ebook. As it turns out, some of that information is most useful when it's published on line—not in an ebook—because the reader can highlight the text of a particular item, then copy and paste the material directly into their Work in Progress.

To this end, I've created a section on this blog called Templates. You'll find it at the top of the right-hand sidebar.

Currently five items are listed.

First, the code of a short book containing all the front-end html needed to get you started, including anchors, copyright notice, and paragraph styles. You could copy and paste that chunk directly into Notepad++ (my preferred method of formatting ebooks). Delete paragraph or header styles you won't be needing, modify the remaining to suit.

There's also a "punctuation swap grid" revealing the Search and Replace items needed to convert your newly formed html file from straight quotes to smart quotes (and proper dashes and ellipses, too).

The other three items are generic copies of those special files KindleGen looks for when it creates the mobi of your new ebook: the html version of the Table of Contents, the navigation map version of your toc (ncx), and the ever popular "open packaging format" file (opf).

Again, you can copy and paste these items directly into Notepad++, modify them for your particular uses (book title, author, pub date, number of chapters, etc.), save them with the appropriate file extension, and you're practically ready to Kindle.

There are short instructions accompanying each file, plus a link to the original post, where more information is given. Create a folder called Kindle Creation Kit (or whatever) and put all the templates there for easy access.