Using Google Docs to Prepare your Manuscript for Kindle Part III

We have looked at creating paragraph, font and heading settings for your document now we come to what many worry the most about - Creating a clickable Table of Contents. However, this is probably one of the easiest things to do.

I'm going to assume you created a Title Page with the title of your book, your

name and copyright information. Right after this page, create a new page by placing your cursor after the last text on the title page and hitting Control-Enter (Command-Enter on the Mac). You now have a new page.

Before proceeding, make sure every chapter title has been formatted by highlighting it and clicking on Heading 1 in the titles menu. If there are subtitles you also want in the menu, be sure they have been formatted as Heading 2.

Now, comes the real tricky part. Place  your cursor at the top of the page where you want your table of contents to begin, click on insert, scroll to the bottom and click "Table of Contents." Like magic a clickable table of contents apprear.

That's it.

Check to make sure all of your chapters are listed. If one is missing, it is because you forget to set it as Heading 1. Go to that chapter and correct it. When you come back to the table of contents page there is a gray box with a circular arrow in it, click that and it will update the page including your new chapter.

Downloading a Compatible Document

Google docs creates it's own format by default. To get a .docx format you need to upload to Kindle click on File, then on download and select Microsoft Word. It saves as .docx, which works fine with the Kindle uploader.

Now, you have a file you can upload to Kindle. As with any Kindle upload, it is good that you view the document using their Kindle previewer after upload. Or you can download a copy of it and use the downloadable version of the previewer. 

That's pretty much all there is to building a manuscript for upload to Kindle using Google docs. Good luck with your own project.