Kindle Tips Create a Kindle Template, Normal Style

Please see previous articles:

Create a Clean MS Word Template

Create a Clean MS Word Template, Two

Things to remember:

• Normal Style is always in the background.
• MS Word uses Normal when you don’t specify a style.
• Normal is the “parent” of all other styles.
• If you make a change to Normal Style, it will, by default, filter down to all other Styles.

That’s why it’s so important to understand Normal Style, and get it right at the start.

Let’s look at the formatting of Normal Style, and decide if it is suitable to be used for the default text for our Kindle books.

Press SHIFT-CTRL-S to display the Apply Styles Box.

Find Normal in the “Style Name” selection window, then click the small “Modify” button, just under the selection window.

The “Modify Style” Box appears, (screenshot below).

Notice at the top of the box, in tiny blue letters, you see “Properties”, then under “Properties”, in tiny black letters, “Name”.

In the “Name” selection box the name of this Style, “Normal” is displayed.

Then, under the “Name” box, another selection box displays “Style for following paragraphs”, which also displays “Normal”.

That shows us that all following paragraphs will be in Normal Style until we specify a different Style.

Next, in tiny blue letters is “Formatting”.

The selection boxes (under the word Formatting), show us that the default font for this version of MS Word is Calibri, 11 pt.

This is a perfectly suitable font for the Kindle, and I recommend leaving it as is for now.

The Kindle will use its own internal fonts, anyway, so you might as well set a standard that will make it easier for your own work.

If something changes in the future, or you find another font that works better for you, you can easily modify this Style.

That’s all we would normally change here, but let’s look at what else we can learn from this box:

Next, under the font selection box, we see the familiar little “left justify” icon, telling us this Style is left justified.

The large window displays several lines of text, showing us what our text will look like when we have formatted it with this Style.

Under that large window, a few lines of text summarize important information about how this Style (Normal, in this case) will format our text.

We go to the sub-boxes to actually enter this formatting information, but for now, lets look at what we can learn about how this Style will format our text.

If we wanted to change this Style, we would click Format at the bottom left of this screen to bring up sub menus where we can change this Style to suit our own needs.
But since we are creating a Kindle Template, we will leave this Style... Normal Style... as it is -- in its default state -- then we will create a new Style to suit our exact needs for most of our Kindle format book.

The reason we want to leave it alone, as we mentioned earlier, is that every change we make to Normal will filter down through all the other Styles in our document.

While that MAY be what we want, it will be safer to create a new Style to take care of most of our Kindle format needs.

We will do that in the next lesson...

How to Modify MS Word Styles for Kindle: Body Text Style