Understanding Your Ebook Formatting Options

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Dipping into the archives again today, with a helpful post from Marcy Kennedy on formatting your ebook.

When I first decided to self-publish, one of the decisions that tied my stomach into the most knots was how to format my ebook. I had a meager budget, and I’ll be honest—I’m not exactly a technological wiz kid. I still use an ancient cell phone with no internet capabilities, and I get heart palpitations every time my computer hiccups.

But what I realized was that ebook formatting isn’t nearly as scary as I thought. In fact, I actually fell a little in love with the process. We have a lot of options, which means we can all find the one that works best for us, for our book, and for our budget.

Formatting Your Book With Scrivener

By Katrina Archer, @katrinaarcher

Part of the Indie Authors Series

Are you about to indie publish a book but can’t figure out how to get the formatting right? Do you already use Scrivener and don’t have the budget to shell out for a high end design app like InDesign or to splurge on Vellum? Then Scrivener’s Compile settings may be the solution for you. While not for the faint of heart, you can turn out a nicely formatted book for both print and digital entirely within Scrivener. The focus here will be on print, because it’s typically trickier, but the same techniques can be used for ebooks. (Note: this tutorial uses features available in the Mac OSX version of Scrivener. YMMV with Windows.)

The F-Word: Tackling the Nitty Gritty of Formatting

By Julie Musil, @juliemusil

Part of the Indie Author Series 

I was having lunch with a writer friend who plans to self publish a series. Of all the indie tasks, she was most overwhelmed by the dreaded F-Word. Formatting.

Believe me, I understand. I’d worried most about this as well. But now that I have two books out in the universe, I’ve come to realize that formatting is really simple.

If you’re trying to decide whether to format your own books or hire a freelancer, check out Understanding Your Ebook Formatting Options on this site by Marcy Kennedy.

Clean Up Your Ebook Files With HTML

By Jordan McCollum, @JordanMcCollum

Part of the Indie Authors Series

I know. After you've gone to all the trouble to get your book looking good in your word processor, why would you want to go to all the trouble of formatting it in HTML—by hand? Especially when your word processor will do it for you?

A few reasons why HTML comes in handy:

• You can post a professional-looking preview of your book on your website—without crazy characters, random backgrounds, and errors.
• Converting your book to HTML can produce a cleaner result for ebook conversion.
• Doing HTML yourself eliminates the needless clutter most word processors insert in their code, making it easier to produce a result that passes a validation test. 
• If your word processor's HTML doesn't validate, your ebook won't either, which will get it rejected by some stores like Smashwords & Apple.
• It's a lot easier to format something in clean HTML than to clean up the output of most word processors.

Seek and Destroy: Using MS Word’s “Find and Replace” to Save Your Sanity

By Dario Ciriello

Part of the Indie Authors Series

You know the problem: you have a story or novel with a lot of fancy formatting in it, and when it comes to prepping it for print or digital publication, you find that scores, even hundreds, of items will need reformatting. A novel, perhaps, which you’d written for submission to agents and publishers following the old industry protocol of underlining words to indicate italics; or—as has happened to me more than once—a long ms. in which some of the quotes are curly and others straight. You reach for the bottle...

Fortunately, help is at hand. Using MS Word’s Find and Replace feature in conjunction with nonprinting character codes, you can quickly and easily carry out global fixes on just about any formatting problem you’re likely to face.

Make Your eBook Look Great and Sell it Everywhere

By Dario Ciriello

Part of the Indie Authors Series

A few basic yet vital tricks and rules every ebook publisher should know

There are two ways of getting your book onto the digital market: either pay a company to format and convert it for you, or else do it yourself. If you decide to do it yourself—which really isn’t that hard—there are a few things you really need to know. By observing a few simple rules and guidelines you’ll not only end up with a professional-looking result but also save yourself time, and preserve your sanity.

Note: before you do anything, make sure to save your doc under a new filename, like “ebook base file” so that your original is always preserved unchanged.