Myles Bevis

Yes!  That’s exactly what I asked!  Could you format your book for Kindle in two minutes flat?

Well I’ve good news for you.  I’ve done it!  I’ve just taken a completed 95,000 word book written on a word 2007 document and formatted it in mobi complete with table of contents (TOC) and cover.  And it is absolutely beautiful, reading perfectly on the Kindle viewer.

In a moment I’ll show you exactly how you can do this too.

I wonder if any of the following sound familiar to you?

For those who have tried formatting in mobi for Kindle yourselves you’ll know how frustrating it can be. Many of you despairing authors, until not so long ago including myself, can take hours and days, and sometimes weeks formatting your slaved over future best sellers. It’s complicated and difficult and it helps if you have a little more than basic knowledge of HTML

Then you find inevitably when it has finally been uploaded to Kindle things are not quite as you intended them to be.

First you find a chapter heading half way down a page.  Then a sentence breaks in half to reappear two lines further down.  You check the TOC.  What TOC?  There’s no sign at all of the @%@%ing little document you took so many hours preparing.  It uploaded but no.  It is definitely not there!

Checking the rest of your document you find the whole ghastly thing’s like that.  It is simply awful.  You’ve done absolutely everything the Kindle instructions tell you to do – and hell, they’re almost impossible to understand anyway aren’t they?  Yes, you’ve done everything just as they showed you but the whole thing’s just absolute c.r.a.p.

So what do you do?

I’ll tell you what I did with my last book The Secret World of Eric Beemer.  I sent the whole sorry mess to a lovely lady in the States who in a about a week sent me back a beautiful fully formatted mobi document which when I uploaded it to Kindle was great.  More or less everything read as it should and the TOC was perfect.

So my book was finally on Kindle for nobody to purchase (must learn marketing next) and I was happy. Then I found a few hundred or so typos, so what happened? It had to go back to my lovely lady in the States again to do a fantastic job of cleaning it up for me. There’s a few more I’ve found since… but I’ll put them down to experience!

“So what’s this pillock on about then?”  I hear you ask.

“Tells us he’s just formatted a book for Kindle in two minutes and then goes on about taking weeks to get it done?”

Okay.  To the point.

First.  There is nothing out there that works properly!  MobiPocket is worse than useless… a total waste of time, and Calibre isn’t much better so I find.

Then.  Totally by accident yesterday I found and purchased (for peanuts) an incredible web based tool named Kinstant Formatter.

Now, my broadband must be around the slowest in the country – hovering around the 1000 KB mark so things are going to be a lot quicker for you.

First I uploaded my word file.  Please note NO HTML NEEDED.  This operation took about 35 seconds.

Then I uploaded the cover… 8 seconds.

Then I wrote the book’s name in the box and my name in the box under… 10 seconds.

Then I ticked the box to make a TOC… 2 seconds.

Then I clicked “Generate.”

4 seconds later a Download notice popped up.  I clicked on save to desktop and by the time I had clicked onto my desktop the file was there in its little Kindle book icon waiting to be clicked to open in the Kindle reader.

As I mentioned earlier the completed book was absolutely perfect, TOC and all, and the complete operation had taken me somewhat less than Two Minutes!  I was, to use a hackneyed sporting cliché… OVER THE MOON!!

Here’s a stupid question!

Would you like access to this amazing tool?

The price is about the same as the bottle of Sparkly wine you’ll buy to celebrate with after you’ve formatted with it for the very first time!

Follow this KINSTANT FORMATTER link to go to the creator’s site.  Read all about and also have a look at the interesting but very short descriptive video.  She’s talking about making it an annually renewable tariff, but right now one single payment of the same amount will give you permanent access.

I have to confess to being a bit thick about technical things etc so I had to play with the tool for a half an hour or so when I tested it before obtaining the perfectly formatted book I’ve just mentioned.  Follow the tips below and you should get the perfect result first time.

The first time I used Kinstant no TOC appeared.  Reason was I hadn’t made my chapter’s headings as ‘Headings’ in Word.  Easily fixed.  I highlighted them one by one and clicked on the relevant heading box on the top bar of Word’s ‘Home’ setting, adjusting the letter size and font to how I wanted it.

I also went through the manuscript quickly in Word having made the formatting marks visible, cleaning up any double paragraph spacings etc before uploading, and also making sure the ‘Section Breaks’ which finish a chapter and make the tool start the next chapter at the top of the next page, were in place.

If having formatted a book with Kinstant you find you need to adjust or re-edit anything make sure you carry out this next step.

As soon as you open your newly formatted e-book in your computer’s Kindle reader it automatically becomes stored in your ‘My Kindle Content’ folder.  Delete this new file inside the Kindle Content folder before downloading an edited formatted version.

So there you are.  I was so amazed and delighted with this phenomenal web based Kindle formatting tool that I really had to tell the world.  Couldn’t contain myself!

I wish you all, my fellow wordsmiths, a bright new horizon in Kindle formatting and may your books, short stories and ‘how to’s’, sell on and on and on!

Seated peacefully in my armchair on a lovely calm summer evening, laptop on knee, this was to be a serene thought provoking blog about a deeply philosophical subject now lost forever in the deeper recesses of my brain.

My wife, Avril – equally peacefully – was lounging, also with knee’d laptop, on the sofa to my left quietly involved in her computerised knitting.

Our home which has had unplanned bits and pieces haphazardly added over the last hundred years or so is now a long twin gabled single story cottage set in peaceful English countryside.

So just before settling to write this blog I collected a reference book from my office which is in the bedroom section down a hallway behind my living  room chair.  Jenny, our cat, was exceptionally sound asleep on top of her bay window chair in the office and I made a point of leaving all the internal doors open to cool the building as the day had been warm.

Ten minutes later I was in the right frame of mind and typing the foundation of the first paragraph on Word 2007.

From the direction of my office came a crashing noise.  Startled, we both looked up.  A furious scrabbling ensued closely proceeded by a thunderous sound best described as likened to a herd of stampeding buffalo rumbling over the prairie.

“Oh No!”  Gasped Avril.  “Zoomies!”

As she uttered this profound phrase a black and white hairy streak cleared the sofa right over her head and landed on another chair before rushing sideways along a wall, dropping to the floor and shooting out the open door into the dining room.  Ears back and
going like the clappers the apparition cleared the room in three bounds knocking an antique clock off the chiffonier before ricocheting to the right into the kitchen.  Sounds of destruction and mayhem ensued and in moments the buffalo noise resumed as the wild eyed creature did a hand brake turn round the kitchen door and pelted along the dining room floor before flashing  back past me in the direction of the office.

The small china oil lamp which rested on top of a sound system speaker rocked gently to and fro and in slow motion toppled gently to the ground, the tinkle of breaking glass coming to me as the lamp’s chimney on it’s final journey caught the edge of the TV stand.

Jenny, our cat, now substantially awake was having an attack of the Zoomies!

Apparently both cats and dogs are affected by this extraordinary and fascinating to watch phenomena now and again and Zoomies is actually a widely used term.  Our dear deceased
previous feline Scampy had the decency to indulge in this behaviour in the garden and would shoot round and round the large lawn like a demented greyhound chasing an invisible hare.

No gardens for Jenny though.  The house is much greater fun!

More thundering footfalls and the out of control creature, using my convenient left shoulder as takeoff point this time launched herself on a long leap through into the dining room again.  Zipping over the antique table top in a controlled skid she propelled herself into the kitchen where more expensive crashing sounds reached our ears.

The complete sequence was repeated two or three times surprisingly quickly then sounds of claws furiously digging gravel in the kitchen came to us as she vented her energy in her litter tray… then silence.

Two minutes later Jenny sauntered happily back into the living room, gave us searching looks as if to say, “Why’d you make all the mess then, huh?”  She jumped deftly onto the
sofa, placed herself squarely on the daily newspaper, turned round, curled up and within seconds was peacefully asleep, snoring gently.

We arose and surveyed the disaster scene.  A lot of picking up to be done but apart from the clock – which hadn’t worked for years — and the glass chimney, not too much damage.  Absorbent granulated litter carpeted the kitchen floor so the single offering left for us in the empty tray was apparent.

Checking my office next I discovered the source of the first crash.  I had left some A4 sheets with substantial hand written notes for my new Eric Beemer novel on the desk using a small aluminium oil lamp as paper weight (antique oil lamps are my business, I
repair and restore them).  The lamp was on it’s side.  Fuel oil had seeped all over the notes making most of them illegible!  Oh!  And three tall piles of books – left over remnants of a failed Amazon project – were scattered haphazardly throughout the room.

So the moral of this story?  There isn’t one really apart from cat’s can be fun… and expensive… and  hard work.  Maybe…  don’t use oil lamps as paperweights on Eric Beemer notes if your cat is prone to Zoomies…

Jenny would like to thank Oscar very much for the kind mention on his blog at http://tinyurl.com/3ch8cmr