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Getting an ebook on Kindle is important to a number of authors today, but getting the formatting just right, putting the pieces all together, can be troublesome. A guest post by Paul Gram goes over a couple of tips regarding this topic.

Formatting Mistakes Authors Make With Their Kindle Ebooks
By Paul Gram

Let's face it, whether you are writing a physical hard cover book or a Kindle ebook, you put your blood, sweat, and tears into your work right? It takes a long time and lots of very hard work to write a good book but unfortunately, many people are doing it wrong and costing themselves lots of sales and money because of this.

Many authors are killing their book sales because of formatting errors and issues on the Amazon Kindle.

Just the other day, I was searching customer reviews on Amazon and I found hundreds of negative reviews from people who bought Kindle ebooks but complained about the formatting. Many times, these people actually liked the content of the book itself, but they were so put off by the formatting that they left a bad review. This is happening with everyone from major authors down to the first time author getting their feet wet in publishing ebooks.

If you are writing an ebook for the Kindle, you would be smart to avoid formatting issues and mistakes. The top two formatting complaints on Amazon are:

1. No clickable/linked Table of Contents
2. Bad formatting in regards to paragraph line spacing

Many authors put their books on the Kindle without a Table of Contents that is clickable. This is a huge mistake and will most likely cause you to get negative reviews and decreased sales. You should never have an ebook that does not have a linked Table of Contents. When your reader wants to go to a specific and certain chapter, you need to make it quick and easy for them to get there or else they will get frustrated.

In regards to bad formatting and line spacing, this is also a very big problem with many books on the Kindle (unless you do it the right way). I have seen lots of formatting issues when it comes to line spacing. For example, not all of the paragraphs or sentences are evenly spaced apart. Another big one that is common is either having no space between paragraphs or way too much space. The other line spacing format issue that I see all of the time is where each chapter starts. The start of a chapter should begin at the top of a Kindle page but many authors don't do this (most don't know how to) and so some chapters start in the middle of the page, some at the bottom, and all of them are all over the place and look awful.

Like I said above, you work hard and spend lots of time writing a quality book, the last thing you should do is ruin it with bad formatting. The bottom line is that for every book you have on the Kindle, make sure there are no line spacing issues, formatting errors, and double check to also ensure that you have a Table of Contents that is clickable and properly linked to each chapter of your book so readers can click on the chapter of their choice and get there quickly and easily.

Paul Gram created the #1 Kindle Template on the Internet which automatically gives your Kindle ebook proper formatting, line spacing, and a clickable and linked Table of Contents. Visit our Ebooktemplates101.com website to check out our ebook template today.

Article Source: 4 Comments on Kindle Ebooks: Formatting Mistakes Authors Make, last added: 2/6/2012