The question has irritated the bejesus out of me for some time.
I am an author who self publishes on kindle through amazon's kdp platform. As the majority of epublishers require, I write my books in Microsoft Word. My shorter books work fine when I read them on my Kindle Fire. However, anything with any length starts hiccuping and freezing, and sometimes crashing the kindle whenever I flick through pages too fast, or click on hyperlinks.
I downloaded all of the free Amazon authored guides on correctly formatting your book for kindle, but alas they were as useless as a dead snail.
I scoured the forums, blogs, and even attempted the monumental task of getting some help from the kindle email support team on a problem beyond the most basic. Unfortunately, I found not a thing that would help.
I found this very frustrating, because clearly someone knew what to do. I own several Bibles on the kindle, and the authors/editors had filled them with more hyperlinks and cross references than the Encyclopedia Britannica, yet the whole thing flowed and read smooth as pie, without ever crashing or even pausing to catch its breath. HOW.
It seems however, after nearly 2 years of experimentation I've figured it out. The problem, dear irritated author, is not you. It is Amazon's woefully inadequate conversion system. Thankfully there is a way around it. It's by making a clean epub.
There may be other ways to do it, but here is how I did it, and it worked, oh glory, it worked:
1. I deleted the Word generated table of contents completely.
2. I copied the text of my long-ish book, and then pasted it into notepad in windows. This helpful little program strips away all formatting of the text, and any of that troublesome and nonsensical code which MS Word tends to confuse everything with.
3. I then copied all the text a second time from notepad, this time placing a completely unformatted version of my book onto the clipboard, and pasted it back into Word, in a completely new file, which I saved.
4. I wrote out a text-only table of contents myself, not leaving any spaces between entries. I then added a bookmark at the word CONTENTS. The bookmark is: ref_TOC
5. I went through the text and reformatted it without ever using 'styles'. I only used bold, italic, underline, the enter key, and increasing the size of titles to 14 instead of their native 12. I didn't change any fonts from Times New Roman.
6. At every chapter start, I inserted a bookmark, naming each bookmark something i would easily recognise.
7. On each entry of the table of contents I had written up myself, I highlighted each one and inserted a hyperlink to the corresponding bookmark. In this way I built the whole table of contents myself.
8. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: I then went back into the 'insert bookmark' page on word, and ticked the box which lets you view hidden bookmarks. Any that I hadn't made myself, I deleted. In some books there were over a thousand. No wonder it took so flipping long for my kindle to sort through all that.
9. So now I had a relatively simply formatted book, without a word-generated toc, rather using my own one made by inserting bookmarks and hyperlinking titles in a table of contents I had written myself. Dont forget the ref_TOC bookmark. The next stage is to convert the book to epub format.
10. There are various programs that will make your word.doc file into an epub, but the one that easily worked the best for me was (shock, scandal) a different e-publisher. haha. I signed up to a site called smashwords (apparently the number one distributor to barnes&noble, apple bookstore etc) and set up an author account. I uploaded the text of my book as a potential smashwords publication, and their conversion engine did the rest. They're way better than the amazon conversion system, although their website is less visually appealing. I didn't upload a cover though.
11. The smashwords upload and conversion system generates your book in a wide range of ebook formats. I downloaded the epub one. I then logged in to the amazon kdp platform and opened up the book that kept crashing. I uploaded the newly created epub file as my kindle ebook text INSTEAD of a word.doc file, and kept everything else, including my amazon uploaded book cover, the same.
12. I then downloaded the newly converted book and sent it to my kindle fire, and thanks be unto the Lord, it finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, worked! From now on Im going to be formatting every problem book this way. Yes, it takes longer, but it also removes the risk of disgruntled customers and negative reviews because the book keeps crashing (yep, I had one).
So, in conclusion, the best way to get a clean, fast, non-crashing book on amazon kdp is to convert your text to epub through smashwords, formatting your table of contents as outlined above. The smashwords website offers a free ebook explaining in detail how to format your book according to their publication standards, which you will absolutely have to follow if you intend to publish with them (which is a very good idea), but you only really need to do the steps Ive outlined above to use their excellent epub converter on your amazon kindle book.
I hope this helps :)
I am an author who self publishes on kindle through amazon's kdp platform. As the majority of epublishers require, I write my books in Microsoft Word. My shorter books work fine when I read them on my Kindle Fire. However, anything with any length starts hiccuping and freezing, and sometimes crashing the kindle whenever I flick through pages too fast, or click on hyperlinks.
I downloaded all of the free Amazon authored guides on correctly formatting your book for kindle, but alas they were as useless as a dead snail.
I scoured the forums, blogs, and even attempted the monumental task of getting some help from the kindle email support team on a problem beyond the most basic. Unfortunately, I found not a thing that would help.
I found this very frustrating, because clearly someone knew what to do. I own several Bibles on the kindle, and the authors/editors had filled them with more hyperlinks and cross references than the Encyclopedia Britannica, yet the whole thing flowed and read smooth as pie, without ever crashing or even pausing to catch its breath. HOW.
It seems however, after nearly 2 years of experimentation I've figured it out. The problem, dear irritated author, is not you. It is Amazon's woefully inadequate conversion system. Thankfully there is a way around it. It's by making a clean epub.
There may be other ways to do it, but here is how I did it, and it worked, oh glory, it worked:
1. I deleted the Word generated table of contents completely.
2. I copied the text of my long-ish book, and then pasted it into notepad in windows. This helpful little program strips away all formatting of the text, and any of that troublesome and nonsensical code which MS Word tends to confuse everything with.
3. I then copied all the text a second time from notepad, this time placing a completely unformatted version of my book onto the clipboard, and pasted it back into Word, in a completely new file, which I saved.
4. I wrote out a text-only table of contents myself, not leaving any spaces between entries. I then added a bookmark at the word CONTENTS. The bookmark is: ref_TOC
5. I went through the text and reformatted it without ever using 'styles'. I only used bold, italic, underline, the enter key, and increasing the size of titles to 14 instead of their native 12. I didn't change any fonts from Times New Roman.
6. At every chapter start, I inserted a bookmark, naming each bookmark something i would easily recognise.
7. On each entry of the table of contents I had written up myself, I highlighted each one and inserted a hyperlink to the corresponding bookmark. In this way I built the whole table of contents myself.
8. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: I then went back into the 'insert bookmark' page on word, and ticked the box which lets you view hidden bookmarks. Any that I hadn't made myself, I deleted. In some books there were over a thousand. No wonder it took so flipping long for my kindle to sort through all that.
9. So now I had a relatively simply formatted book, without a word-generated toc, rather using my own one made by inserting bookmarks and hyperlinking titles in a table of contents I had written myself. Dont forget the ref_TOC bookmark. The next stage is to convert the book to epub format.
10. There are various programs that will make your word.doc file into an epub, but the one that easily worked the best for me was (shock, scandal) a different e-publisher. haha. I signed up to a site called smashwords (apparently the number one distributor to barnes&noble, apple bookstore etc) and set up an author account. I uploaded the text of my book as a potential smashwords publication, and their conversion engine did the rest. They're way better than the amazon conversion system, although their website is less visually appealing. I didn't upload a cover though.
11. The smashwords upload and conversion system generates your book in a wide range of ebook formats. I downloaded the epub one. I then logged in to the amazon kdp platform and opened up the book that kept crashing. I uploaded the newly created epub file as my kindle ebook text INSTEAD of a word.doc file, and kept everything else, including my amazon uploaded book cover, the same.
12. I then downloaded the newly converted book and sent it to my kindle fire, and thanks be unto the Lord, it finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, worked! From now on Im going to be formatting every problem book this way. Yes, it takes longer, but it also removes the risk of disgruntled customers and negative reviews because the book keeps crashing (yep, I had one).
So, in conclusion, the best way to get a clean, fast, non-crashing book on amazon kdp is to convert your text to epub through smashwords, formatting your table of contents as outlined above. The smashwords website offers a free ebook explaining in detail how to format your book according to their publication standards, which you will absolutely have to follow if you intend to publish with them (which is a very good idea), but you only really need to do the steps Ive outlined above to use their excellent epub converter on your amazon kindle book.
I hope this helps :)
