Using LibreOffice to Create Perfect Kindle Books

Once upon a time, if you wanted to write a book and get it sold you had to be accepted by a publishing company. Getting accepted wasn't always easy. Often it took years and several tries before they'd take a risk on publishing your work. They were the biggest hurdle new writers have to clear in order to become Published Authors.

That is no longer the case today.

With the advent of Amazon Digital Publishing the big publishing houses, the middlemen, have been completely cut out of the equation. Now anyone with an idea can write a book and put it up for sale. The caveat is, you're not publishing a traditional book but an eBook for the Amazon Kindle. On the up side, the Kindle is the #1 ebook reader on the planet (sorry Apple), and in the hands of millions of loyal Amazon customers around the world. An independent author can potentially reach millions of readers by selling their books on Amazon.com exclusively as a Kindle Edition.

Amazon provides only the most basic tools for creating a Kindle-compatible ebook. In fact, the only tool they give you is a command-line based tool for converting MS Word documents to the Kindle format. You don't necessarily have to do this on your own. You can upload a file in various formats and Amazon will do the conversion for you. But, getting the formatting of the document correct is usually the most difficult part.

If you've ever looked into writing for the Kindle you've probably seen a lot of videos on Youtube warning you to not use OpenOffice/LibreOffice. They demonstrate that these do not properly format the documents, making the ebooks come out looking sloppy and unprofessional. For those who don't know, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free, open-source productivity suites that give you the same tools found in MS Office. People have tried using them to create books for the Kindle, and they didn't come out right.

Well, they were doing it wrong. Here's why.

You can create really good looking Kindle books using OpenOffice/LibreOffice rather easily. I'm actually pretty surprised that nobody else has figured this out. The key to properly formatting a documents for conversion to a Kindle book is forced paged breaks at the end of chapters and page formatting to indent paragraphs. That's all it really takes. Nothing could be more simple that that. Putting in a page break is really easy. Just put the cursor at the end of the section of the document you want the page break to occur and then selection from the menu Insert and then Manual Break. The manual page breaks prevent previous chapters from bleeding onto the page of the next chapter, or the cover page or forewords from bleeding in on your table of contents.

Setting paragraph indents in LibreOffice are just as easy. Simply highlight the text you want indented. Goto the menu and selection Format, then select Paragraph... and you will get this dialogue box.

Where it says First Line enter the value 0.40 and click OK. You've just indented every paragraph you'd highlighted, and this will show when the document is formatting to the Kindle eBook format.

Doing a Table of Contents is a bit more complicated, and will be the subject if a future blog. Not all books need a table of contents, so if this is the kind of book your writing then I hope this blog has helped.