Short read.

Using Google Docs To Publish On Kindle.

A quick guide to page setting and line spacing.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

The Kindle book creator doesn’t work for me so I have been using both google docs and slides to try to format my book with many issues getting the margins and spacing correct.

Uploading as a doc file saved from google docs worked better than pdf, though I have found pdf works well if you’re using slides. Slides are good for shorter books.

To curb the frustration while getting this published, I will document my small successes along the way here on Medium. Also, I will probably need somewhere to look when this works out and I can't remember how.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

To provide some scope, my book includes images, is 11,500 words, and just under 1800 pages. I’m no expert so I want to help others who may be learning as they go too. (Please excuse the added inexpertise in the screenshots.)

Here are some guidelines for formatting that are working to date:

1. Update title, heading, subheading, and normal text formatting in the styles dropdown menu on the toolbar.
2. Apply styles by highlighting the title, heading, subheading, or normal text areas to apply the correct style as in the screenshots below.
3. 18–24 pt font titles, 14–18pt headings, and 14pt normal text.
4. Add next page section breaks to the end of pages.
5. Your document will look squished on docs (at 100% zoom), but well-spaced on kindle, this may take several uploads to correct.
6. Page setup details in the screenshot below show the difference in the kindle page preview.

1. Normal text spacing at .3, at para. spacing at 6 and 0.5pts.

2. Update and apply styles.

6. Page setup.

6. How it looks on kindle.

With all the fuss over margins and spacing, I hope I remember to edit the grammatical errors in the poem that I just noticed.

Best of luck to anyone else giving this a go with little Word or Kindle skills. I’m sure there are far easier and better ways to do things, but that’s the fun in learning as we go and having no luck googling.

The next mission will be the chapters and fitting in images.

Back to work.

Thanks for reading.❤

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