Ebook Formatting Does Matter
I'm here to nag. I'm good at it. I had twenty-plus years of practice as a mom. So sit up straight, stop playing so many video games, and make sure your ebooks aren't loaded with errors!
And I'm not just talking to you, Indie Published Author, who prepared your Kindle edition yourself. I'm also looking at you, Traditional Publisher. You're older, you should know better. The younger kids are watching you, you know.
Here's some of what I've seen since venturing into ebook reading last fall:
A traditionally-published historical novel, newly released, with loads of copyediting errors and missing most blank lines between scenes.
A traditionally-published fantasy novel that has been a huge publishing success, but certain sections of it (not the whole thing) are full of copyediting errors.
A traditionally-published fantasy novel, very recent release, with a table of contents that shows the first line of a preface, then a dedication, then the stuff at the end of the book, then the "sections" of the book—which is incredibly confusing if you happen to be a reader like me who looks at TOC's. This book also had a few random sections with multiple blank lines, but the copyediting was good.
A self-published, currently 99 cents ebook that has been getting a lot of publicity in the last couple of weeks, and which starts off with "Chapter 1" centered and set off in big type, and then immediately under it "Chapter 1" left aligned and in standard type, as it must have appeared in the original manuscript. This one also has lots of funky characters sprinkled throughout. I like to think of them as WordPerfect errors-in-translation because I had the same thing in my older manuscripts but I hunted them down and killed them.
Yes, I'm being a scold, but my point is that ebooks should not be looked at as the poor cousin of print books. Editing and formatting matters in ebooks too. Shoddy goods eventually fail in the marketplace. And besides, it's a point of pride to do stuff right. Right?
That said, if you discover copyediting or formatting problems in my ebooks, please let me know.
