All three of my formerly-perfectly-functioning books now look horrible on ‘Look Inside’. I have seen various people saying they are using Sigil to fix this. Terms like ‘consolidate stylesheets in Sigil’ are used to describe it. I have no idea how to actually do that. My workflow has been Scrivener–>Sigil–>Kindle Preview/.mobi. I only use Sigil to indent the TOC of these non-fiction books. I can see all of the stylesheets, but there is no ‘consolidate’ function.
So… since some of you have already solved this, how can I use Sigil to fix the stylesheet challenge?
While awaiting enlightenment from the group, I confirm what others have said: Amazon will correct the problem if the book displays correctly in the Kindle viewer. Here is a copy and paste of the message I got back after submitting a case yesterday evening:
Hello Maurice,
Thanks for contacting Kindle Direct Publishing, I hope this email finds you well. I am sorry to hear that the look inside feature is not looking correct for your three book. Let me do my best and manually fix the look inside feature of your books.
I have your KDP account and I could confirm that the previewers of your kindle books are showing correctly and the problem is just in the Look Inside, so I have manually adjusted the Look Inside feature for them, so feel free to confirm the Look Inside feature showing correctly with the same format as the previewer by accessing the following links:
I hope this information will be helpful for you and I do apologize for any inconvenience caused. In case you need further assistance I will be here at your service.
Consolidation isn’t, generally speaking, a feature or something you can click, it’s more akin to what one would do if they wished to consolidate several paragraphs of text from multiple files into one file. It’s taking a look at the CSS used to style each individual section in the ebook and ensuring that the material displayed within the Look Inside preview range is all drawing from the same CSS file, and thus in most cases the files have had their class assignments modified to work in unity.
For example, when a machine exports formatting information to HTML, it tends to use serialised classes (like “p1”, “p2”). Where this causes problems is when the title page uses “p1” to style the title of the book, and “p2” to style the author’s name, but then a subsequent chapter uses “p1” to style the chapter heading and “p2” to style paragraph text. Since Amazon is only using the first CSS file, the paragraph text ends up looking like the author line from the title page and so forth. Thus fixing this might involve creating a “p3” class for paragraphs and then searching and replacing all of the “p2” assignments from the chapter .html itself to reference “p3”.
There might be a feature that helps with this in Calibre rather than Sigil. It has a lot of options in its conversion utilities, many of which are designed to clean up formatting.
Well you probably wouldn’t need to do it for all of them, just anything that would be included in the Look Inside preview. I’m sure that is all Amazon is doing on their end when they fix it.