How To Keep Half-Title And Title Pages The Same Font Size On Kindles

Scrivener
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Hi All,

I’ve published my debut novel on KDP using Scrivener to write and compile the output files for Kindle, paperback, and hardback.

The paperback and hardback copies have the correct font and font size I want to use from the front-matter sections I’ve setup. However, on the Kindle, while the font stays the same, the font size changes to large and the half-title and title pages have their text wrap around on the Kindle screen. Yet, when I dropped the e-pub file into the Kindle viewer after compiling the file, the font and font size for the half-title and title pages look correct. It’s only when I load the file to my Kindle that I see the font size change. I’ve looked and I can’t figure out how to stop this happening!

With all the other indie ebooks I read on my Kindle, and the Amazon Classics I’m currently reading, the half-title and title pages have no issue with font or font size. And my Kindle is set to the default of using Bookerly at font size 4.

Does anyone know how in the Scrivener compiler, or another part of Scrivener, to make sure that the half-tile and title pages can be set so that the font size doesn’t get large and so the text wraps around and the half-title and title pages end up going into two pages for the half-title page, and three pages for the title page where I have the book title, series name, and my name?

Any help you guys can provide would be most appreciated as trying to google a solution to this issue is driving me nuts!

Kind regards,

David

2

As I often recommend, it’s best to compile to .epub and crack open the file with a tool like Calibre or Sigil, which will show you the actual formatting that Scrivener puts into the book. Trying to judge what is going on using nothing but book readers is extremely difficult since you are basically looking through an opinionated lens. The ebook reader designer will have opinions on what an ebook in their software should look like, and each individual reader often has numerous settings to change how books look beyond that, which can change leading, font sizes, whether the text is justified, etc.

Both of the tools I linked to above will give you a much more “honest” opinion of the output, but more importantly they have tools for analysis as well. You can see the HTML itself, and the CSS that makes it look the way it does. You can see precisely where padding is coming from.

To conclude: don’t stress too much about getting it “right” on one particular ebook reader. You might be able to do that, but then another person using the same exact reader might see something completely different, and never mind all of the different reader softwares and devices out there. Ebook design is about vague instructions, not getting the text size just right or optimising which word gets wrapped where.

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Then there is, of course, the Kindle Media Query statement to add rules specially for Kindle devices:

@media amzn-kf8  {
	.className {
		propertyName: value;
	}
}

Text wrapping onto the next line can only be cicumvented by making text smaller or the width of the container wider.

Text wraping to the next page might be mitigated by adjusting the margins set above and below the text on your titlepage. The media query above may help with that.

Hope this Helps

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