How do you get chapter marks to appear at the bottom of the Kindle page?

[A.J.B]

Hey everyone,

It's been an absolute age since I last posted on MWC and just got the bug again to get back to talking to other writey-types online.

I have one book published but can't help but notice that, when open in the kindle, it doesn't have the little black lines depicting when the end of a chapter is. How do I make these appear when publishing? Is it a case of putting each chapter in a separate document for upload when creating a new e-book? Or am I missing some other, incredibly simple thing?

[Alice, a Country Gal]

Wish I had an answer for you AJB, but I don't use a Kindle, so I have no idea.

Guess I'm a throw back to the dark ages, don't use a 'smart phone' either. 

[heidi52]

Did you create your original document in Word? You can have chapters show up in the footers.

Word help can walk you through how to do it. Then when you convert to an epub for the kindle that info should stay. Haven't done it myself, but that's the theory. 

[Artemis Quark]

If you insert a page break in Word the next chapter will start on a new page. Don't know what you mean by the little black lines unless you mean the solid line that shows up when you select all of your text. The line actually says 'page break'.  There is also a 'section break', good for printed versions where line numbers, etc. are in the header/footer that change with each chapter. Not needed with the Kindle format.

There is an ebook available on the Amazon Kindle Direct website called Building Your Book For Kindle that has other pointers. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007URVZJ6

AQ

[Nick]

You definitely can't upload a series of chapters to Kindle - it has to be a single file (usually in HTML format).

I'm not sure what you mean by black lines at the end of chapters either. But you could certainly end each chapter with a line of dashes or something like that, and insert a page break command to ensure that the following chapter starts on a new page. I use <mbp:pagebreak/> for this purpose.

[sallyj]

I use Mark Coker's formatting guide - it works for Kindle as well as Smashwords. And it's FREE.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Smashwords-Style-Guide-Format-Guides-ebook/dp/B004XWJ7UK/

For a new chapter I just insert a page break in the word document.

[bailish]

I use Mark Coker's formatting guide - it works for Kindle as well as Smashwords. And it's FREE.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Smashwords-Style-Guide-Format-Guides-ebook/dp/B004XWJ7UK/

For a new chapter I just insert a page break in the word document.

Here's a link to the same book but available outside the UK.

http://www.amazon.com/Smashwords-Style-Guide-Format-Guides-ebook/dp/B004XWJ7UK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1407196949&sr=1-1&keywords=smashwords+style+guide

[Tony_A20]

Hello A.J.B.,

To have the chapter marks appear at the bottom of the Kindle display, you need to create the e-book using Kindlegen.exe.

Kindlegen uses the OPF file (the OPF file contains the manifest), to determine what is front matter and what are content divisions. If content divisions (usually chapters), are recognized, the e-book package will contain chapter markers displayed at the bottom of a portable Kindle display.

If you are not seeing the chapter markers at the bottom of the screen, either content divisions are not correctly identified, or the tool you are using to create the kindle book is inadequate.

I recommend creating a mobi file by submitting an OPF file to kindlegen.exe, then uploading the .mobi file to KDP. How to produce a Kindle e-book is covered in my e-book, How To Build A DIY E-Book (see "Publishing Frenzy" in the MWC Self-Publishing Central forum).

Tony