Format It Yourself

Should you learn to format your own books? I think you should – and this is coming from a woman who runs a side business formatting books for other authors. No. I’m not deliberately trying to put myself out of business, honestly. But I do think that whether you do it or not, every author should know how to format their own books.

Why?

For one all-important reason – one of the greatest thing about self-publishing is that you can change your work! It’s not set in stone once it’s published! Honestly, it’s not. It used to be.

With traditional publishing, once your book was published that was it. Once you accepted that copyeditor’s changes and made a few more of your own, that book might as well have been carved into the side of a mountain. There was absolutely nothing you could do to change a comma, put a “n” after an “a” because no one caught that tiny little mistake, or anything. It was done. Period. End of story, live with your typos.

But with self-publishing, that’s not the case. Forgot something? Go back and put it in. A clever reader catch a few typos? Fix them! Find out that Amazon has changed their keywords and added subcategories to their lists? Oh My God! Go and change those keywords! That’s what I’m about to do to my books – oh, and I somehow forgot to put in the right code for a left-single-quote in Storm on the Horizon, so I’ve got to back and fix that. Not a big deal. You know why? Uh-huh! Because I formatted it!

Yes, I made the mistake. But I can just as easily fix it. It’ll take me about 15 minutes to fix it and re-upload the corrected book. Oh, ok, maybe 20 because I’ve got to re-upload it to 5 e-retailers where I’ve got it for sale. But I can do it. Easily. And you know what…

SO CAN YOU!

Yes, you can learn to format your own books. It’s not hard, really! It’s tedious. It can be downright boring at times. I put on some fun bopping pop music and get formatting. And I get decide exactly how I want my book to look (within the limitations of an ebook where I can’t choose the font). I can put in pictures and drop-caps. I can have my chapter titles in the center, on the right underlined, or even on two lines (although, I have to admit I didn’t like the way that looked). And I can really go to town with the CreateSpace version! There I can put in pretty fonts to my heart’s content. I can put pictures in between chapters (did that with the anthology Tales From The Mist), and do all sorts of other fun things – really whatever I want.

So, how do you learn to do this? Easy! I’m going to be offering a formatting class on-line. Yeah, you knew that was coming, didn’t you? J It’s going to be the week of July 15th, but I’ll be taking questions for a few weeks after the class ends so that as you try out all that you learned, you can ask for help. It’s just $25 for a class that could make your books entirely your own.

Interested? Fill in this form, the information will be emailed to me:

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