Simple Ebook Formatting with Jeff Dvorak

I've had a few folks ask me about the nitty gritty details of ebook formatting, so we'll have a couple of guest posts coming up on that topic (my way of formatting my ebooks is having someone else do it for me, so I figured I'd bow to the expertise of others). We'll have a post coming along that details the way to get in and tinker with the html and such, but today's post offers a simpler solution.

Thanks, Jeff Dvorak, for writing this up for us.

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I just published my first book 2 weeks ago. Once my work was done I knew I had three more steps before I could get my book out there; commission a cover, get it professionally edited and format it for the Kindle and Nook. As I write this, tomorrow, August 18th will be my 14th anniversary working for eBay so I would consider myself a computer guy but even I didn't want to have anything to do with formatting my own book. It's hard enough making the words presentable, I had no desire to make the text presentable also.

Before I started down the ePath I did a lot of research and when it came to formatting, what everyone said was how difficult it was. Kindle doesn't read Microsoft word, it will put in weird characters and weird breaks, it will look horrible…you must have a professional format it! The problem is, the people saying that are also the ones saying, "I can do it for you!" So I drank the kool-aid and when I was ready, I contacted a formatter off a well known blog and sent them an email. What I got back was that if I got them my manuscript within two weeks, they SHOULD be able to have it back to me in six to eight weeks….that's how far out they were. Not to mention it would cost $150. After five minutes of staring at the screen, dumbfounded, I knew I needed to bite the bullet and learn how to format.

Now I'll admit, it took me the better part of two days to get it right but mostly because I didn't write it correctly. As I wrote, I double spaced every paragraph, I didn't indent the first line of each paragraph and when I finished a chapter I skipped a line, wrote chapter X, skipped another line and kept going. So the first thing I had to do was clean up my text. I removed each extra line from between the paragraphs, I indented each paragraph and at the end of each chapter I inserted a page break. Those are very easy to do. On the Word toolbar, go to "insert", then "break", make sure the radio button for page break is chosen and hit ok. Once you've done all that, on the standard toolbar there is a paragraph icon, if you click on that it will show you every break, return, space…everything you have put in your document. Once you've enabled that you can go through and take out any extra line breaks or miscellaneous spaces that you added by mistake. That's pretty much it folks.

Once you've done all that you want to resave it as a "webpage, filtered" document. Go up to "save as" and when the save box appears, under the heading "save as type", change that to "webpage, filtered". There is a lot of coding that exists within a Microsoft word document which enables the document to function in the Word environment that could cause problems out on the web. By saving it as "webpage, filtered", it will strip out the unneeded code which makes it easy for Amazon to read.

Now comes the fun part. If you have a Kindle, great, if not, get the Kindle app. When you register your Kindle or Kindle app, Amazon gives you a unique email address where you can send your own documents. The first thing you'll need to do is go into your account on Amazon and authorize your personal email so they will allow documents from that email to your Kindle. Once you've done that, email it to yourself. In a minute or two, it will show up on your Kindle and you can read it just like you would any other book. From there you can review the formatting and tinker with any changes you want. In my case, two of the chapters ended naturally at the end of a page so with the page break there was an extra blank page. I went back in, removed the break after those two chapters, emailed myself again and it was fine. Once you've completed this, the document works well with both the Kindle and the Nook.

As I'm writing my second book now, I'm making sure to do the minor things I didn't do with the first book and when I'm done, the only thing I'll have to do is save it as "webpage, filtered" and that's it. It'll be formatted. Now I'll admit, this is just the basics of formatting. If you read my book….which I would LOVE!, you will see that it is only the book. I didn't embed the cover on the front page, I didn't put a title page, copyright page or any of the affiliated items. My book is strictly the book but it is perfectly formatted like any slick legacy published book. Once you have these basics, you can tinker with the others. This weekend I plan to include my cover and create a title page and see how that looks. I'll go through the "emailing myself" phase again and if I like how it turns out, it's really easy to change your document on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You just go to your author page and upload the new document. Usually within 24 hours they will swap out the old document for the new. People who have already bought your book can even go and download the new version for free…but that's a different blog topic entirely.

Anyway, that's about it. I hope this information proves useful and if you have any questions for me please leave a note and I'll respond as soon as I see it. Thanks for your time and good luck.

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Thanks, Jeff! If you guys get a chance, check out his novel, The Trinity Murders, or pop over to his blog or say hi to him on Twitter.

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