Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected] Self-Publishing Day Five F: Formatting, an introduction; I: Ideas for making your book look professional; L: Layout Today we’re going to get started on the formatting part of this course. We start by discussing the different ways you can format your book and the different types of formats there are, and we’ll also do the first step of formatting—cleaning your document. tl;dr: • Types of formats: ePub, mobi, PDF, doc and docx • Programs you’ll need to format • L: Layout and I: Ideas for making your book look professional Details: I’m sure you’ve noticed that a large chunk of this course is devoted to formatting. Yes, it is because I’m a formatter, but it’s also because formatting is something that a lot of authors think they can do themselves and then they end up with either boring or outright unreadable books. Personally, I love the design and creativity of formatting. But formatting isn’t all creativity. A lot of it is boring, repetitive work, but it needs to be done. So put on your favorite music and let’s take a look at this thing. Types of formats Before you begin to format, you’ll need to decide where you’re going to publish your work—that will determine which formats you need. There are four different formats that you’ll need to create in order to publish everywhere (what I recommend). ePub: This is the industry standard ebook. You’ll need to create an ePub in order to upload to most e- retailers (Nook, Kobo, Apple iBooks and Google Play) and have the option of uploading to Draft2Digital and Smashwords (I’ll discuss the pros and cons of uploading an ePub to those sites when we discuss uploading). .mobi: mobi is the name given to ebooks that can be read on a Kindle (device or app). It is the file type you’ll need to create to upload to Amazon. PDF: You all know PDFs—those are files you need Adobe Reader to look at. When you convert a Word doc into a PDF you are setting the formatting so that anyone opening that document sees your file exactly the way you saw it, complete with the same spacing and fonts. It used to be that it was difficult to tamper with a PDF, but unless you deliberately lock it (password protect it), it’s quite easy with Adobe DC to edit them. We need to create PDFs because they are what you’ll need to upload to KDP, IngramSpark, or any other print-on-demand outfit. Note: by Word doc, I really mean a document Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected] created and editable in any word processing program. Microsoft Word is the one used by most people and so I used it as a generic term. Speaking of Word docs: .doc and .docx: These are actually Microsoft Word extensions (that the letters after the period in a file name. mobi is also an extension—all ebooks for Amazon are “FileName.mobi” which is why it’s called a mobi file). Beginning with Word 2007, files created by the program have the extension .docx instead of the old .doc. (they changed this because docx files take up less space and do a bunch of other good technical things). For some reason Smashwords requires a .doc file to be uploaded when you publish there and can’t read a .docx. Don’t worry, though, you can still have Word create a .doc instead of a .docx just by saving the file slightly differently. I’ll explain how when we go over formatting for Smashwords. The other place where you might want to upload a .docx is to Draft2Digital which will then convert that file into an ePub and .mobi file for you. As I said before, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of doing that when we talk about uploading. One thing I would highly recommend you NOT do is upload a Word docx to Amazon. If you do, you cannot be guaranteed that the book will look right – they say so in their guidelines. If you want your book to look the way you have formatted it you must upload either a .mobi file or an ePub (and you can do either one). So, to sum up, here are your options and which formats you’ll need for which retailer: Major Retailer Format type Amazon .mobi Apple iBooks ePub Barnes & Noble ePub KDP, IngramSpark, or any Print-on-Demand PDF Draft 2 Digital ePub or .docx Google Play ePub Kobo ePub Smashwords .doc or ePub Programs you’ll need to format your book: There are a number of ways to format your book and convert what you’ve formatted into an ePub and .mobi file: Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected] You can go the technical route (recommended for people who really like to get into the nitty-gritty of computer programming) and code your book in HTML (it’s the computer language used for creating websites and ebooks) and then convert that into an ePub with Sigil (a free program). If you’re going to go the HTML/Sigil route, to work with HTML documents on my PC, I use Notepad ++. It’s an easy-to-use text editing program. For Mac, I use TextWrangler. All of these programs are free, so this is a great way to go if you’re comfortable coding and want to save money. If you’re less tech-savvy, there are two good options for creating an ebook: The Atlantis Word Processor is a basic word processor (similar to Word but with fewer bells and whistles) that can save your document as an epub and mobi (if you allow it to install Kindlegen – KindleGen is Amazon’s program that converts documents into mobi files. You won’t have to work with it directly, the program uses it behind the scenes.). It does not create drop caps, but does allow you to embed fonts and is otherwise is a really easy, inexpensive word processor that will also create ebooks for you. It costs $35. The program I recommend more highly than any other is Jutoh. It’s perfect if you want to do anything from simple formatting to fancier things like drop caps and conditional formatting, which allows you to format a book one way for one version, say an ePub, and another way for another version, like a mobi. (I’ll tell you more about the advantages of conditional formatting when I discuss ebook formatting in detail.) Jutoh costs $39 and allows you to download the program as many times as you want to all of your computers (Mac and PC). It also has great support from the developer of the program who has a Yahoo Group where he (and anyone else) will answer your questions. You can use Jutoh as a word processor, but it’s main strength lies in its ability to create ebooks. It will convert your document into a mobi file (you’ll need KindleGen installed on your computer, but the program will provide you with a link and instructions on how to download it so that Jutoh can find it on your computer) or an ePub. For more complicated books (that include lists or footnotes, you can convert into an ePub3, which allows for these. (Note: I have a class on Teachable.com just on how to format with Jutoh that teaches all the ins and outs on formatting with this program.) To look at your formatted .mobi file and see how it would look on various Kindle readers and apps, you’ll need Kindle Previewer (free from Amazon). Kindle Previewer is also what you’ll use to create your .mobi file if you use Sigil to create an ePub. To look at my ePub book file, I use Adobe Digitial Editions to make sure it looks the way I want. This is also a free program. If you want, and have either a Kindle or a Kindle app on a tablet or phone, you can also transfer your mobi file to that to look at it there as well. The same goes with an epub if you have either an ipad with Apple iBooks, a Nook or Kobo e-reader. If you transfer your epub to any one of them, you can see how it will look to people who read your book. L: Layout The layout of your ebook is mostly determined by the e-reader on which it is being read. The hardest thing for some authors to comprehend (especially those who don’t normally read ebooks) is that the reader actually determines a good deal of your book’s layout. For example, font size. You, the author and formatter, can make a font larger or smaller in your ebook, but really you need to leave that up to the reader who may need or prefer a particular size. Generally, in Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected] ebooks, font size is a relative number not an absolute. So if I choose 12pt font, the e-reader may interpret that to be whatever size the reader has chosen. For my chapter titles, I’ll choose a larger size, say 16pt. The e-reader will interpret that to be a third larger than the standard font (there are set percentages for every size).