Does the Look of Your Amazon Book Page Matter?

Does your book look like shit?

You can open a book and see how it looks. You can go to your ‘Look Inside’ on Amazon and see what potential readers are seeing. You can even use the ‘Online Reviewer’ with Createspace to figure out how your book will look in print.

You can do all of these things, but are you doing them right? Does your book look like shit?

We talk about this a lot with website content, the need for white space. Gosh, it sure seems like online readers like a lot of white space, at least from how much is written on it.

Do book readers want the same? Perhaps more importantly, has the book reading public’s wants and desires changed due to their online reading habits?

Today we’ll get a little more in-depth and talk about how you can go about creating some of great page looks with your formatting.

Take a look at this chapter page from one of my books on Amazon:

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Just about all of them look like that now, with snappy dialogue and short bursts of action. In other words, it doesn’t take up a lot of space, creating a lot of that white space.

You want to do about the same with non-fiction books, as you can see with my latest:

Both of these look professional. Don’t think so? Take a look at the #1 book on Amazon this week:

So by now you can tell that each of these books looks about the same. All of these books are good – they’re formatted correctly so they look good and buyers feel confident making the purchase.

This is what you want, and we’ll explain how to get it by showing what you don’t want to do. By now I’m sure you’ve perused ‘Look Insides’ on Amazon quite a bit. Chances are you’ve seen some crappy ones. We’ll be discussing those today.

Formatting Your Book for Amazon

Let’s take a look at my latest fiction book, Bring Back Our Girls. Here’s what a chapter start looks like:

You can see that it’s got a pretty clean and crisp look, and I did that all myself using MS Word. This is what you don’t want:

You don’t want this. So what do you want? Let’s go through the steps, taking that page all the way down to the basics first. To do that I’m going to use Ctrl+A to Select All, then clear the formatting, like this:

That will give me a clean look. I then keep that Select All going and select which font I want to use (I always use Bookman Old Style):

Now, you can see the spacing has been decreased, so I’ll go ahead and make that a little easier to read by going into Format then Paragraph, like this:

After that I’ll choose which kind of indentations I need based on whether my book is fiction or non-fiction. This is fiction so I’ll choose my indents like this:

This will give me this look on Amazon:

I like that look but I’m not a big fan of single-spacing, so I’m going to go ahead and change that to 1.5, which I find makes it easier to read when I’m working:

Now, let’s move on to that chapter heading. First, I don’t want that double-spaced or whatnot, so I’ll change that back to single:

I’m not going to make it a heading, I’m just going to select it and make it Bold and 16pt font…usually. Since this book is a little different I’ll just make it bold while also getting rid of that indent:

I need to type in 0.1 or even 0.01 in that “By” box. If you choose “First Line Indent” it’ll give you 2.0 which is just too large. And if you want no indent you have to put 0.1 because Amazon will automatically indent otherwise. I’m not sure how it all works, but I know it does.

Let’s take a look at indents more, perhaps with bullet points and a non-fiction book like my latest history book. Here you can see a page where I didn’t use bullets (they don’t work with Kindle) but instead used a dash. I do this all the time, and I’ll show you how it works.

First, for the dash I use an “em dash” which is longer than a typical hyphen. I also make those little dashes bold.

After that hit the indent button two times and you’ll be fine. If you don’t format nonfiction books correctly with that 0.1 indent it will look like this book on Amazon:

That’s not what you want, and I think you can tell why. Well, I hope that stuff helps you get your book looking good on Amazon. If not, you can pay me and I’ll do it for you.

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