Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
J: Formatting with Jutoh
For those of you who are not so computer savvy or just want an easier way of formatting your book, you can also convert your Word document into an epub and mobi file using the paid program, Jutoh. Jutoh is a program created for authors to convert their work into an ebook. That is its originally intention, unlike Calibre which has been used that way despite the fact that that’s not what it was meant for. Because it was meant for authors, it has a lot of great features which make formatting beautiful books easy, as you’re about to see. It’s not very expensive ($39) and has a devoted following of people who happily share information on how to use the program—there’s even a Yahoo group devoted to it where the developer answers questions that others cannot. Jutoh will use the clean, formatted document you created at the beginning of this lesson to organize and create your ebook. Basically, you are doing most of the formatting in Microsoft Word and then adding in all the fun stuff using Jutoh. If you want, you can directly import your cleaned Word document into Jutoh and then add all the styles and page breaks there, but Word is easier to work in (the window is larger and the text is easier to see). Before you begin to read this long and detailed explanation of how to format your book in Jutoh, please know that I created a video that shows you how to do all of this. It’s available for free on Youtube. Now, if you’d want the written version, read on!! Open up the clean document you created in Word. If it isn’t already, save your clean document now as a docx. If you don’t have that capability because you’re using an older version of Word, you’ll need to do it through an on-line converter (just search for “convert doc to docx and you’ll find plenty of ways to do this). But Jutoh does not accept doc files, unfortunately (nor rtf or txt). Begin to format your book in Word Add in Styles (Note: if you don’t know how to work with Styles in Microsoft Word, but would like to learn, I’m going to be creating a class on Teachable.com that will teach the finer points of Word and how to format for CreateSpace. Just let me know that you’re interested and I’ll tell you when the class is uploaded.) 1) Create a style called “No Indent” and define it the same as your Normal style except under “Special” in the Paragraph Window choose “none” so that it left justified your paragraph. 2) Use “Find” to find all of your chapter headings (Chapter…) and make them Heading 1 style. As you go through and do this, also click on the beginning of the first paragraph of each chapter and choose the style “No Indent” so that it’s left justified. 3) Use “Find” to find all of your section breaks (you can do this by either searching for whatever you used to denote section breaks (*** or ### or whatever) or you can search for two paragraph returns in a row (^p^p). Be sure that there is something in between your sections (***, etc) because it will make it easier to search for them in Jutoh. Be sure that your section breaks are in the style “Separator” (you may need to create the style) which will center them. Also, while you’re there, be sure that the first paragraph after every section break isn’t indented (Style: “No Indent”). And that’s all you need to do to prepare your book for Jutoh. In the program itself you’ll add in the rest of your formatting, images and links. Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
Import the book. When you start Jutoh, you first see the “desktop” and are given the option to “Create a new project”. 1) A new window will open where you can input your book title, author name and other pertinent information. Fill in all you can/want to. You have to at least fill in title and author name (they’re required fields) and I would highly recommend that you fill in the subject as well (it will include the subjects as metadata in your file). 2) The next screen wants to know where you’re going to save your finished book files. The default is the Jutoh folder in your documents folder. You can change it to whatever you want. 3) Keep the next screen at the default setting for a flowable book. A flowable book allows the book to adapt to whatever reader it is being read on and the reader to change the font and font size to how they want it to be. You don’t want to change that. 4) The import options, again, stay just the way they are. Just click through to the next screen. 5) The next screen wants to know what file you want to import. You want the second option to import from an existing file containing all sections—that’s the clean Word document you’ve created. When you click the radio button next to that, it will take you to your documents folder so that you can choose the correct document. 6) Next it wants to know how to split your chapters. If you already began the formatting using the instructions in the Smashwords chapter, you want to open up the drop down menu and choose “Heading 1”. You should see your chapter titles in the window.
7) Finally, the last screen wants your cover file so that it can embed it into the beginning of your book.
This is what you’ll see next: Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
You’ll notice that you don’t have any page breaks between your book description and your title, and between your title and your copyright. That’s because you told Jutoh to only put in page breaks before the Heading 1 style and those styles are not present here. You’ll need to add in the section breaks. (The same as in Sigil, these guarantee a hard page return between each section). Place your curser at the beginning of the line which should start the next page then press Control-Alt-H to split the document. A window will pop open wanting to know what you want to name that section. I like to call my title page “Title Page” and my copyright page “Copyright”, but I’m boring that way. You can call them anything you want. Adding pictures 1) Place your curser where you’d like the picture to be 2) Click the picture icon in the ribbon or in the Tools tab of the Palette to the right of your document.
3) Find the picture on your computer (it will open up your file/finder) and “Open” it. It will appear where your curser is. Dropcaps 1) highlight the letter you want to be a drop cap. Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
2) Open the character styles palette in the “Styles” tab on the right by choosing “Character Styles” at the bottom of that part of the window (the default is Paragraph Styles, but if you click where it says “Paragraph”, you can choose “Character styles”. 3) Double click on “drop caps” in the list shown in the list of styles. 4) You’ll notice that that letter will change to being a proper drop cap. Note: If your first sentence begins with dialogue (and therefore a quotation mark), it is acceptable to just delete that opening quotation mark and make the first letter a drop cap. Your reader will get that this is dialogue when they see the end quotation mark). Make sure your sections have unique titles and the correct “Guide type”. In the “Organizer” on the left side of the screen you’ll see a list of the sections in your book. Right click on a section and choose “Properties” at the bottom of the list that pops open. This is your Book Section Properties window. Here you can change the title of the book section – for example, Jutoh automatically titles the very first section in the book “Title Page”. But, in fact, the first section of my book is the book description, so I will retitle it to “Book Description”. In the center of that same window is a line that says “Guide type:” The box next to it probably says “(none)”. This is fine for most sections in your book (there is an option for “Title Page” that you may want to apply to your title page, and the Table of Contents will automatically be labeled as such). If you want your book to open to a specific page, say, your book description rather than Chapter One (which is where a Kindle book will open by default), you can open up this drop-down menu and choose “%STARTPAGE%”. Now your book will open to this page.
Click the right arrow at the bottom left-hand corner of this window to get to the next book section if you need to change that one as well, otherwise, just click “OK” at the bottom. Build Your Table of Contents. 1) Under the Book menu, “Build Table of Contents” is the last option at the very bottom. 2) In the first window that opens on your screen, choose to “Create TOC with Jutoh’s help”. 3) In the next window, be sure the “Matching style” (towards the bottom) is the Heading 1 (you’re chapter section’s style). If you’ve got Heading 2 sections as well (such as chapters within stories within your anthology), be sure to also set the Level 2 to Heading 2. Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
4) The next window shows you the list of entries which will appear in your table of contents. You can move them around, add some if they didn’t show up for some reason or delete any you don’t want. Compile your book. In the lower left hand side of the main screen, you’ll see that you can choose which configuration to compile your book. If you’ve got different sections for different vendors, you’ll need to build your table of contents each time you choose a different configuration. Check your book. Be sure you have a way to open your ebooks: Adobe Digital Editions and Kindle Previewer installed on your computer (they’re both free and can be found on the Resources page). After you configure your epub, you can click “Launch” (right next to the “Compile” button on the lower left side). It will open your book in Adobe Digital Editions.
Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
To open your Kindle book, you need to first open Kindle Previewer and then open the book from within that program.
Other Programs for Formatting
Calibre: This software was originally designed for readers to keep a library of their ebooks and allow them to convert PDF or Word documents into ebooks so that they could read them on an e-reader. It was never meant for authors to create books. That being said, many, many authors (including myself for a time when I was coding my books in HTML) used it to convert their books into e-books. It has gotten a lot better at that, but it still puts in all sorts of unnecessary hidden coding. Last I heard, Apple iBooks will not publish an ePub created with Calibre. Vellum for Mac: This is, apparently, a fantastic program. Easy to use and does all the formatting an author could want for their novel. I don’t know how it is for non-fiction, bullet points, indented text like poems and other more complicated formatting. Unless you buy it outright, you will have to pay a fee every time you want a book converted into an ebook. Scrivener: This is a great program for organizing a book. Lots of authors also really enjoy using it to write their books since you can track the number of words you write easily. A number of people are now using it to format their books as well since you can export your book as an ePub using Scrivener. That being said, you can’t do fancier formatting such as drop caps using the program. For a simple, plain book, Scrivener, I hear, is very good and easy. Atlantis Word Processor: I mentioned this earlier, but this inexpensive word processor has the ability to save your document as an ePub and mobi. It’s not quite as basic in it’s formatting ability as Scrivener, but not as fancy as Jutoh. Adobe InDesign: Now here is where we get into super-duper fancy formatting. You can do absolutely anything and everything with this professional-grade program. You will also need to spend $700 for the software and take a course to learn how to use it. It is not intuitive at all, unfortunately, but really produces professional-looking books.
There are probably many more programs out there that can be used to convert either a Word or HTML document into an ePub and/or mobi file. These are some of the most popular. The one that you should use is the one you are most comfortable with and does all that you want to do with your book, it’s that simple. I’m sure your head is reeling (maybe it started about halfway through this huge document). I assure you, if you follow the steps through for your desired method of formatting, it’s going to be super-easy! I’ve given you a ton of information here so that you can do this on your own. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask! Thanks! Merry Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
Remember I can always be found: General Website: https://meredithbond.com Formatting: http://anessabooks.com Coaching: http://servesyouwrite.meredithbond.com