Publishing E-Books For Dummies

Using Page Breaks to Separate Your Chapters

In almost any book, a new chapter begins on a new page. Your e-book is no exception. Many authors make the mistake of bumping a chapter to a new page by pressing the Enter key multiple times. This technique causes all sorts of problems, including one that you’ve almost certainly noticed: If you add material to, or remove it from, Chapter 2, for example, you have to add or delete line breaks in all remaining chapters to force every chapter to start at the top of a new page again.

All these extra line breaks cause other problems: They make the HTML code look messy, and they create huge gaps in the MOBI or EPUB files you create, making them difficult to read. (The page size on the Kindle, the Kobo, the iPad, and other e-readers is much smaller than on your computer screen.) Smashwords doesn’t even accept e-book manuscripts that contain more than four consecutive line breaks.

Frustrating, right? The good news is that you can start text on a new page in a much easier way — by using the Page Break feature in Word. To add a page break, open your e-book, go to the end of a chapter, delete any extra line breaks, and then follow these steps:

1. Position the cursor where you want to insert the break.

The easiest position is at the start of the chapter heading.

2. On the Insert tab, choose Page Break from the Pages group.

The chapter heading “jumps” neatly to the next page.

To remove the break, you may need to turn on the display of hidden characters ...