How to Make a Living with Your Writing: Books, Blogging and More

by Joanna Penn

Format your ebook You need to have a mobi file for Kindle and an ePub file for the other platforms but don't let technicalities put you off. There are a number of options for ebook formatting. Load Word documents into the various sites e.g. Draft2Digital and let them auto-format your files. This is really only good for plain text and you won't be able to fix up any formatting you don't like. Do it yourself using Vellum ebook formatting software. This is what I use now as it creates gorgeous ebooks, but it is Mac only. You can find it at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/vellum. I’ve also made a tutorial on how to use the software for formatting: www.TheCreativePenn.com/vellum-tutorial Pay a professional formatter. There are lots of professional formatters out there now and some offer print formatting bundled with the ebook. Here's my list: www.TheCreativePenn.com/formatting. You can also ask other authors for recommendations or use the Alliance of Independent Authors Partner member directory. Some authors don’t want to mess around with ebook files. I used to feel like that too, but seriously, if you’re publishing a lot, then you will want to have a hand in the process. It will save you loads of money if you're doing this for the long term because most of us update ebooks regularly with new back matter or to fix outdated content.

Format your ebook