Formatting Tribulations

I love formatting. The creativity involved, the logic of the computer programming part—everything really. There is nothing more satisfying than opening up a book either on my computer or tablet and looking at a beautifully formatted book. It’s even better if I’m the one who made it that way. It makes reading a pleasure, just as trying to read a badly formatted book is a frustrating experience.

To that end, I work really hard to learn all the best ways to create a beautiful book. I’ve learned HTML. I’ve fooled with all sorts of different conversion software from the easiest (Jutoh, in my opinion) to the hardest (MobiPocket), and everything in between.

The problem is there are a good number of these programs out there and more keep appearing almost weekly. Which one to use? That’s the question. And do you really have to know HTML to use them?

For most of these programs, you don’t actually need to know HTML. You don’t have to add computing code to your document to get a readable book, you only need to do it to get a pretty book and to make sure that all of your symbols (m-dashes, accents, whatever) turn out the way you want them to. 

While coding your book into HTML helps to ensure that you get the look you want, you are still bound by the software you use to convert your HTML document into a mobi file (for Amazon upload) or an epub. Now, it is possible to convert your HTML directly into mobi or epub, but then you don’t get that lovely table of contents in your e-reader and the measure along the bottom of your book that shows readers how far they are through the book (the NCX file). To get that (without a ton of coding), you need to use a program like Sigil, Calibre or Jutoh.

My biggest challenge is to know which conversion program to use. I used Calibre for a while, but then found out that it was putting all sorts of odd coding into my books and I was told that Apple iBooks won’t accept any epubs created with the program.

Since then, I bought Jutoh and have been loving it, but when I put in dropcaps it doesn’t put them next to the text, but into the first line of the paragraph thereby creating spacing issues (a huge gap between the first line where the “dropcap” is and the rest of the paragraph). Sigil doesn’t do this, but it also doesn’t have some nice features that Jutoh has (in Jutoh I can create one document and convert it differently for the different vendors, right down to the links to other books which need to be vendor-specific). Jutoh also made putting footnotes into a document as easy as pie. I haven’t tried doing that in Sigil, but I’ve got a feeling it doesn’t have the capability--I would need to code them, which is a pest (been there, done that).  

So each converting software has its issues. There is none that is perfect for every book. So, I trudge on experimenting with each new thing that comes out. The biggest catch with all this experimentation, of course, is that I teach formatting and just about every time I do so, I’ve got to rewrite my “lectures” to conform to what I’m currently using. And that’s what I’m doing this week.

My next formatting class (actually, a full self-publishing class for beginners, but if you already know what you’re doing, you can just skip or breeze through those lessons) is being offered on-line through the FF&P Chapter of the RWA (that’s the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal Chapter of the Romance Writers of America ).  You can sign up for it here.

So tell me, how you convert your books. Is there a program you prefer or do you take your chances by uploading a Word document directly?