Formatting Your Manuscript for E-Books

As many indie authors are discovering, this is a sticky problem. What looks great on your screen in no way looks like that on an e-reader. Throw in the fact that everyone reads on things from their phones to a large computer screen and it's a mess!

During one of my reviews, I got into a conversation with the editor who was working on Christina Weaver's book about this problem. Afterwards, she offered to do a guest blog post for me. So here it is, folks! What everyone wishes had been online earlier. ;-) I hope this helps you ready your next book to venture out into the great unknown.

Ebook Typesetting

As I have learned the hard way, ebook typesetting is harder than you would think. It’s so far removed from print typesetting that they aren’t even in the same county, and it requires HTML and CSS code which is enough to make any writer’s head spin. It can prove profoundly frustrating, and requires some research and patience. 

Having just gone through this process, myself, I can provide you with tips on how to typeset your book for (most) ebook formats. Keep in mind that ebook formatting also differs from device to device. A .mobi has different requirements than an .epub, for example. Annoyed yet? Good. 

While I know Scrivener and several other programs can export books into ebook format the way I am going to discuss is using Word and Calibre. Most people have Word already (and if you don’t, I know Open Office has the same functions, so you are fine), but if you don’t I can’t help you other than to suggest Open Office which is a free, open-source office suite that mirrors the Microsoft Office suite well. I can’t help you with Mac options since I don’t own one and know very little about them. If you are not familiar with code I strongly advise you acquire a WYSIWYG HTML editing program. I have not used the freeware programs for doing this, but if you type “WYSIWYG HTML editor” into Google you will receive a bunch of hits.

In Word, start with your complete manuscript as clean as you possibly can. Edited and with chapter headers, and everything. Keep in mind that you cannot use crazy fonts for this. Stick with the basics like Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia, and so on. If you use crazy fonts the fonts will very likely be changed to “the next best” by devices and this will lead you to formatting problems. Also be aware that readers often will change the font themselves to ones they prefer. With ebooks you have to focus more on the structure than the aesthetics because every reader and every e-reading device will set them up differently. It’s just a reality we have to live with. At this point you should “justify” the entire thing. Don’t worry how it looks on your Word screen; it’ll look horrible. But it’s better on an e-reader by a substantial margin and produces a far more professional ebook.

Now, your next step is going to be setting up your “normal” style. This is extremely important. You MUST use styles to set up your book, or they will not translate into code.

You can change these styles however you like by right clicking them and making changes to their natural layout. You also want to make sure the “normal” paragraph style does not have breaks before or after paragraphs. This will result in ugly paragraph breaks in the end product. It’s fine to have when you’re working on the manuscript, but at this stage you want to remove those. You can still use bold, italic, and underline formatting tools, but do not change the font or size using the built-in tools.

Now highlight the entire document and apply the “normal” style to it. Yes, the whole thing. Even your chapter headers. 

Once you’ve done that you should go through and set up your chapter headers. You should use “Heading 1” (and modify the style until it looks how you want), but I suggest keeping it simple. Like I said earlier – no crazy fonts. It’ll cause formatting issues later. Make sure you are using “Heading 1” – it will be important later. For the book Insomnia just released I used the Garamond font as the chapter header and Times New Roman for the main text. 

Once you have gone through and done all the formatting to the chapter headers you are going to need to add page breaks ONLY at the end of chapters. These must be done using the “page break” function. You cannot just hit “enter” until the pages separate. This is extremely important – if you do page breaks wrong it will mess up the flow of the document and can cause unsightly errors on e-reader screens. Remember, you are formatting for a screen of many sizes; the reader will be flowing the text from page to page automatically, so even if it looks right on your screen it won’t on the e-reader. Since e-readers don’t have a set size you cannot determine what a specific “page” looks like on every device. Unlike formatting for print, you need to allow the device to adjust the file to its parameters as much as possible. 

Finally, you will need to create a table of contents in your document, and I don’t mean just typed. It needs hyperlinks! This is simple to do in Word, particularly if you used Heading 1 for your style for each chapter start. These are important to your book in ebook format because it allows readers to hop to their chapter without having to flip through every page of the book. 

To do this you should start on a blank page and write “Table of Contents” in whatever heading you used for chapter headings. From there enter down to a new line. Now, the instructions I’m about to give are exclusive to Word – I don’t know how Open Office or other programs handle this.

On this new line you are going to go to Insert and then Hyperlink.

You then click “Bookmark” and all your chapter headings should be listed. Click on the chapter you wish to add and hit “ok”. It should return you to the page I have the picture of above. Check that the “Text to display” is what you want and correct it as needed. Repeat this process for every chapter in your book.

There is a way to do it if you haven’t used the “heading” style for your chapter headings, but it requires you to go to each chapter heading and create a bookmark there. It’s more labor intensive than this version, and I find it unnecessary.

As an overview, so far you should have:

·        Opened a clean and finished version of your novel in Word (or similar program).

·        You have “justified” the entire document.

·        Applied the “normal” style to the entire document.

·        Applied a heading style to chapter headers.

·        Added page breaks (using the page break function) to the end of chapters only.

·        You have created a clickable table of contents.

This should be enough to produce a basic ebook without anti-hyphenation or dropcaps. If you have done this properly you should not have odd font changing or size changing through the document, and you will have properly formatted chapter breaks. If you do not have a program where you can edit code and are not familiar with HTML or CSS at all (and have no one who can follow the steps to edit it) I strongly recommend you skip the next section and go straight to the end where I discuss how to save as various files. If you want to learn or experiment feel free, but make sure you save a version of your document as it is right now to save yourself the headache of having to do it all over again if you mess something up. I learned this the hard way and had to reformat The Vanishing of Katherine Sullivan about six times due to my own incompetence while learning.

If you are still reading I assume you either have code experience or have a WYSIWYG program you are passingly familiar with. 

The first thing you want to do is use the “save for web” function in Word (or whatever program you are using) to make it export the .doc into an HTML document. Then take that HTML document and open it in whatever code editing program you use. I’m going to break down the instructions into segments so you can choose which applies to you and your book. I strongly suggest you at least use the “anti-hyphenation” feature.

Anti-Hyphenation

This feature will, on most e-readers, stop your words from hyphenating at the end of the line. It’s a great feature and will make your books infinitely easier to read. However, I want to note that this code does not work on the Nook. I tried it on several Nook devices running the software and Nook’s program ignores this code and aggressively hyphenates no matter what you tell it to do. I spent about a week tearing my hair out over this and after extensive research determined that everyone has this problem. I’m not sure why Barnes and Noble would do this – it creates ugly ebooks – but there’s nothing we can do about it.

In your CSS add this snippet:

p {

  hyphens: none

}

This will prevent (most) e-readers from hyphenating your words. It’s a great piece of code and can help you make your book look more professional. Nook is a lost cause on that score, but this works fine on every other device I have tried.

Drop Caps

Drop caps are the large letters at the beginning of a chapter. These look great, and this code works in .epub format, but NOT .mobi. Make sure that you separate the HTML for .epub and .mobi for that reason, otherwise you are going to have issues with your first letter of every chapter cut off.

To do drop caps you add this into your class CSS:

.firstcharacter { float: left; color: #903; font-size: 75px;  

line-height: 60px; padding-top: 4px; padding-right: 8px;  

padding-left: 3px; font-family: Georgia; }

Obviously you can adjust the line height and font size depending on how you want them to look. And you should change the color to black for most cases. Play with the details to get the look you want.

In order to use this for your drop caps, go to the first letter of each chapter and add this:

<span class="firstcharacter">L</span> orem ipsum etc. 

This will create the drop cap at the beginning of each chapter and is a great finishing touch to add that “something extra” to your ebook. Obviously replace the Lorem Ipsum with your text – just make sure the first letter is in the location of the “L”.

This section discussed:

·        Using CSS to prevent auto-hyphenation.

·        Using CSS to create drop caps.

Finally, we come to the part where you change your book into different formats. If you have been using the CSS snippets you should have separated the CSS for your .mobi file and your .epub file already depending on whether or not you wanted drop caps. 

The first thing you want to do is load an ebook conversion program. I have heard of many, but I use Calibre and find it to be the easiest of all of them in terms of usability. Your first job will be to “add books” from your HTML files. Add both of them to your library and then select “convert books”.

 After that it should walk you through the process. For all books I strongly suggest you select “Expand CSS” under the “Look and Feel” tab – it will make sure your code for hyphens and drop caps works properly.

That’s the whole of it. There are some glitches and errors you can run into, particularly with pictures, that I am not qualified to speak on. However, if you are having issues with your fonts not being consistent through your whole book and so on chances are you don’t have them all set to the same style, so you should make sure every paragraph in the book (yes, you read that right) is using the correct style. Remember, the first step of this was to make sure the entire book has the “normal” style to start with. If you do that then you should be okay.

Best of luck to you in your formatting!

E. Prybyski is the editorial manager for Insomnia Publishing (www.insomnia-publishing.com). She also keeps a regular blog on her experiences with writing, editing, and publishing at efharvey.wordpress.com. When she is not writing or editing, Prybylski plays violin and cello for her tolerant husband and three cats.

What's in a Cover?

In a word, everything. We're all told to never judge a book by its cover, but admit it, we all do, whether we mean to or not. We're drawn to certain artwork or styles of covers over others. It's just how we are. And in this day and age of technology, where we see our books put before us in digital form by their covers, it's more important than ever.

Every day, hundreds, if not thousands, of new books hit the market. Self-publishing has made it possible for all of us to get our work out there. We no longer have to go through the painful process of writing queries, finding an agent, and hoping a big publishing house will pick up our book. If we want to avoid that, we can. However, it's important to know how to market our book.

As I said in my last post, it's important to put out your best work, and to do that is to hire an editor. Well, what's just as important is to hire someone to make your cover for you. Maybe you are artistic enough to pull it off yourself. Or maybe you're one of the lucky ones who has a friend or someone in the family who can do it for you. No matter which way you go, you have to make sure your cover stands out and screams "LOOK AT ME!" You need to intrigue someone enough to click on that link to read the blurb.

Let me give you an example here:

The first cover was on the "first edition" of this book. The second was done by a fan of the author and became the "second edition." Of these two images, which one grabbed your attention? Most likely the second. As a matter of fact, when I talked to the author about these two covers, he admitted the new cover boosted sales by quite a bit. It makes you intrigued. You want to read the blurb and see what it's about. 

NEVER underestimate the power of the cover of your book. It's what your readers will see first, whether it's in digital form or sitting on a bookshelf in a store. It's what will encourage them to pick it up so see what it's about.

Yes, artists that specialize in book covers can be expensive. But I can tell you from experience, it's hard work! It took me all day to come up with a cover once and it sucked. LOL You don't want someone to come up to you and say, "Writing isn't that hard, surely you should just hand everyone your book for free." So please don't insult a book cover artist when it comes time to determine what their work is worth. THEIR work is what will draw more attention to YOUR work, so it's worth going with the best you can afford.

Look for someone who does artwork you admire. They should have a portfolio you can browse so you an see if you two will work well together. You don't want to pay $500 only to find out that you can't stand how they do their images. Of course, you can probably find someone cheaper than that. Just remember you get what you paid for.

Some places you can find good artists is on deviantart.com. Another option is to see if there's a good art program at a nearby college. Many new artists would be willing to take a little less money for the option of having your cover in their portfolio for the future. So look around and see what's available. Just remember, we DO judge a book by its cover.