Character Styles and ePub CSS

Question

I created an ePub which looks fine in Kindle Previewer.

The ePub has certain words in bold and certain other words in blue.

For this i used character styles

My client used Kindle Create, but all that formatting has been lost.

How do i ensure that the words always appear in bold /blue everywhere?

I understand that to target paragraphs you can use classes. How do you target character styles?

James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted Answer

Not after about 2011. &#128578; (Sorry, that's a joke.) If what you get in Kindle Previewer is what you want buyers to see, you're done. (That is, no, you do not have to do a bunch of manual steps that the old, hand-built methods demanded.) If you don't see what you want, adjust the layout etc. in ID, and/or edge into using CSS to modify the export styles, and re-export; repeat until you have it right. This is the only professional way to publish EPUB/Kindle in 2024... I mean, almost 2025, especially if  you have InDesign and reasonable skills with it. Happy to answer any further questions. &#128578;

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

So... you created a book in InDesign, exported it to EPUB (reflowable, I would hope), and it previewed fine in Kindle Previewer... and then your client dragged that into Kindle Create and got lousy results?

Color me shocked. The Kindle book tools are, gently put, junk for amateur users, as well as being frequently changed without notice and having absymal documentation and support.

The proper workflow here is to finish the book in EPUB export as the client wants, not hand it over to them to run through a blender to add some junky formatting and content at their end.

To answer on a technical level, you don't need to change anything if you have used Paragraph and Character styles in good ID practice. Both export just fine to EPUB, as the KP preview shows. If the client insists on using Create, they should have no problem identifying the character styles and breaking those, too.

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