Tables, while legal aren't easy to set, and other tips to make your Amazon publishing life easier.

This will be the penultimate blog on my Amazon publication (CreateSpace and KindleDirect) experience.

Let’s start with topic in the title.

In an earlier blog, I reported that CreateSpace automatically indents paragraphs to their present indentation, even if you have already done this in your file. This is fine for narrative paragraphs. However, because of the size of the page in your print book, you may not (probably won’t) want paragraphs in tables, which you have massaged to fit in the space you have allotted for them, to be changed in size because of the movement of text in the cells as the paragraphs are indented “for you.”

I gave up trying to work with tables as tables. Here are my workarounds. The first items in Appendix A from RIFTS are tables. In the print version, they come out just fine—the PDF you submit is a bit more forgiving. The examples in the picture have the first column Right Justified—that took care of the first line indent.

This is the table as shown in the print copy.

What follows is the “table” as it appears in the e-book.

The content is identical in both, but the format is dramatically different. While I prefer the above because of the premise upon which my book is based, the e-book workaround does very little to diminish that premise.

Ultimately, if you have only narrative text in your manuscript, this isn’t an issue. If you have tables, and you can’t get them “right” on CreatSpace of KindleDirect after one or two tries, I would screen shot the table(s) and insert them as figures where you want them in your book.

Next week: I’m finishing my series of “Things I learned about the process when I published through Amazon.com (and how you can streamline your experience!). Last blog on that topic: Final thoughts on Figures… And Kindle Previewer—What a wonderful tool.

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