Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected] Self-Publishing Day Seven
S: Formatting for Smashwords; P: Print-on-Demand Formatting
Congratulations! You’ve gotten through the hardest part of formatting—creating ebooks! And it really wasn’t all that hard, was it? Today we’re going to go deep into the other two formats most people will need: Smashwords and for Print-on-Demand. Happily, both are done completely in Microsoft Word and so are easier to start with. One note here: when you format your book for Smashwords, you are also formatting it for Draft2Digital (we’ll just save it as a different type of file). That’s the great thing about Smashwords formatting—it’s really just very clean, very basic formatting. A lot of people are either annoyed by the particulars of formatting for Smashwords, or just plain scared of it – I’ve even heard of some professional formatters who refuse to format for Smashwords. I think that’s kind of silly. Really all you have to do is follow the guides set out by Mark Coker in the Smashwords Style Guide. This is an abbreviated version. And for today’s topics, because they are essentially two different topics, each will have its own tl;dr section. Ready? Here we go: Tl;dr • Complete cleaning your document by getting rid of tabs and extra spaces. • Format of your book using Styles. • Create a Table of Contents • Be sure to save it as a .doc file and not a .docx.
Detailed Version You have a choice of formats you can upload to Smashwords. They accept both a Microsoft .doc file and an ePub. Normally, I would say absolutely, upload the ePub, you have better control over what your reader will get and you can do nice things like embed fonts and put in drop caps. There’s just one problem with that. When you upload an ePub to Smashwords, they will not create an excerpt or sample of your book for readers to look at before they buy the book. This can determine whether or not someone buys the book. So, for that reason, I would recommend that you stick with the boring .doc. Yesterday we created a cleaned Microsoft Word document. At this point you should have your document with all of your italicized and bolded words and phrases re-italicized/bolded, all instances of double spacing deleted and all tabs gone. Yes? Great! If you followed the instructions to format with Jutoh, you also have your chapter headings in the Heading 1 style and the first paragraph of every chapter and section in the style “No Indent”. If you don’t have that, please go through and do that (creating the style “No Indent” which is the same as your Normal style except without the first line indent). Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
Styles The fantastic thing about styles is that if you want to change the way all of your headings look (or any text) you just change the style and everything changes throughout the document. I say this because we want to modify the Heading styles so that they conform with Smashwords rules. “Heading 1” style with the following settings: • The font should be the same as the one you chose for your text, but the size should be no bigger than two point sizes larger than your text. • Spacing which should be 6pt for Before and 3 pt for After. • Special should be “none” so that it is truly centered on the page.
A few notes about Smashwords The Smashwords “Meatgrinder” does not allow more than two hard returns in a row (remember this is an e-book you’re creating so don’t worry about the placement of your chapter title on the page). And your fonts can’t vary more than 2 or 3 sizes in either direction (if your text is 12 point, your chapter titles can be 16 points at most). For a final check of your document, turn on the pilcrow—the backwards P just to the left of the Styles in your Ribbon Tool bar on a PC, or up in the top row on a Mac. You should not see any symbols in your document except the paragraph marks at the end of every paragraph and page breaks at the end of every chapter. Make sure you have no symbols such as the copyright symbol – it won’t translate in the “Meatgrinder”. Don’t forget to remove all headers or footers. For your title page, you cannot have any font that is too much bigger than your text. I’ve had my title be as big as 18pt. when the rest of the text was 12 and it passed, but if you make it too big, it may be rejected by the Meatgrinder. Don’t forget to put in the hyperlinks to your social media sites and website in your “About the Author” page: More recently, Smashwords has been insisting that you have a table of contents in your Word document. To create this, you need to put in anchors where you want your ToC to link to. In Word, they’re called “bookmarks”. On a PC: 1.Go to the place where you want to link to (say, Chapter One) 2.In the middle of the “Insert” ribbon is a section called “Links” and there you’ll find “Bookmark”. 3.Click on that and give your bookmark a name – no spaces! Be sure that every bookmark has a unique name. 4.In your table of contents, highlight “Chapter One” (or your chapter title) and right click. 5.Choose “Hyperlink” from the menu. A new window will open up: Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
6.Choose “Place in this document” on the left and then click on the bookmark you’ve already created for that place in your document. 7.Rinse and repeat – I’ll go through the document putting in all the bookmarks and then go and fill in the ToC at the beginning of my document. It just makes for less jumping around. On a Mac: 1.Go to the place where you want to link to (say, Chapter One) 2.Highlight light it, then go to the “Insert” menu. At the bottom of the list you’ll find “Bookmark”. 3.Click on that and give your bookmark a name – no spaces! Again, be sure that every bookmark has a unique name. 4.In ToC which you have typed in wherever you want it to be, highlight “Chapter One” (or your label for where you want to go) and right click. 5.Choose “Hyperlink” from the menu. A new window will open up:
13.Click on “Locate” next to the Anchor section. This window will open: Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
14.Choose “Chapter One” or whichever is appropriate and click “OK”. 15.Rinse and repeat Once again, remember to save your document as “BookTitle Smashwords.doc” (not docx). And that’s it! Easy! Remember to save your file as a .doc (Word 1997-2003) document since Smashwords doesn’t read .docx (Word 2007 and above). If you’re going to upload this document to Draft2Digial, just save it as a .docx, as they don’t accept .doc files (sigh… they have to be different, don’t they?). �
There are a couple of different places where you can have your book printed in hard copy and sold. I prefer KDP Print which has taken over CreateSpace (which was an Amazon-owned company, but run separately) because there are no upfront costs and the easiest to format (with Ingram Spark you pay $49 to create your title and then they charge you for every change you make to the document; for KDPP, they build their fees into how much you can charge for the book so you don’t pay anything directly to them, but they receive payment every time someone buys your book). A number of people have begun publishing their books on both platforms: they publish it through KDPP to get it on Amazon easily, and then also publish it on Ingram Spark for its distribution, which is much better than the expanded distribution available from KDPP. The only difference in the formatting is how you save your document. When saving a document for IS, you need to create a PDF/x-1a (2001) and make sure it’s black & white and not printed in color. To do that you either need Adobe Acrobat DC (which is available through a subscription either by the month (about $23/month or by the year for $180) or Adobe In-Design (which is a very complicated program for which you’d need to take a course to learn how to use it—I, at least, did not find it intuitive at all). You also need to make sure that all of your fonts are embedded properly, which is super-easy, just a matter of checking the properties in your PDF. For both platforms, first, you need to know what size book you want to have printed. The smallest size KDPP offers is 5x8, which is a pretty standard trade paperback size. If your book is very long, you might want to go with a larger size book so that it will have fewer pages (it will, therefore, be less expensive to buy). Otherwise, I’ve found 5x8 to look just fine. In Ingram Spark, you can go as small as 4x6 for a print- on-demand paperback. IS also prints hardcover books, which KDPP doesn’t. Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
For both platforms, you break down your book into Interior (the text) and Exterior (the cover). In KDPP, you can download a template for each. Here’s the link to the interior template: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834230 (this is the help topic where you can find the templates to download) Be sure to download the “formatted template”. It’s much easier to work with. For the exterior template, you’ll need to know how many pages long your book is, so first complete the formatting for the interior. When you’ve finished that take the number of pages to this page: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/cover-templates For IS, you need to download their File Creation Guide which will give you detailed information on how to create your own template. In KDPP, you have a choice of either white or cream colored paper. The cream paper is thicker, but I like the white as well. It’s a personal preference. As we discussed when we talked about covers, it would be best if you have a professional cover artist design your book cover for KDPP too—this cover is different in that it includes the spine and back cover. They should know how to do so and will send you a PDF of your book cover for you to upload. You’ll just need to tell them the size of the book and whether you’re going to use the cream or the white paper as it will affect their calculations for the width of the spine.
tl;dr: • Download the templates. • Copy and paste your book into the template, ensuring that you’ve got section breaks in between each chapter and not page breaks. • Create your book cover in Paint.net, GIMP or whatever photo manipulating software you prefer, or have your cover artist do this (recommended) and send you the PDF file. If you’re doing it yourself, you’ll need to create the spine, and decide on what picture you want to go on your back cover under your blurb. Don’t forget to leave space for the bar code – but you don’t need to create the bar code, KDPP will do that for you, you just need to leave the space they mark out for it. Save your cover as a PDF (I’ve used PDF995 free software, but there are many such programs available on the web). Some people even use PowerPoint to create their cover. I did so once to test it, but prefer the versatility of a paint program. It’s up to you... • Upload your beautiful book and then order yourself a copy after it has past KDPP’s auto-check (which takes about 24 hours).
The Detailed Version: Open up the clean, formatted Word document of your book. At the same time, open up the KDPP template you’ve downloaded. • Select the text in the template, making sure, when you do so, that you leave the last section break in the document (you can see it when the pilcrow (that backwards P that shows you where paragraph breaks and so on are) is on) or else when you copy and paste your document in, the size of the pages will change). Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
• Select the entire text of your book from your Smashwords document. • Paste the text of your book into the KDPP template (replacing the KDPP nonsense text with yours). • After you paste your book into the template, go through and change all of your page breaks to section breaks. The reason why you need section breaks, as opposed to page breaks is so that your headers and footers are correct. Headers and Footers • Be sure to turn off “Link to Previous” in the first chapter header so that you don’t get your headers in your front matter pages (title page, copyright, dedication, etc). • Do the same for the footer. • Page numbers are already in the template (feel free to change the font or size of the page numbers if you so desire). • Typically the title of the book is on the odd page, the author’s name or chapter title (if you’ve got titles for each of your chapters) are on the even pages. Fonts and Spacing The great thing about KDPP and physical books is that you can use different fonts and font sizes. You can add pictures (although, unless you choose to print a book with a color interior (which would get expensive to print and therefore purchase) they will be in black & white). Also, be sure that all images are 300 dpi (dots per inch) or greater, otherwise they won’t print clearly (and you’ll get an error when you upload the book to KDPP). Generally speaking, have as few fonts as possible: possibly one for your text (something easily read like Times New Roman, Garamond or Georgia 11pt), and one for your title and chapter titles. I usually put dropcaps into this font as well. Single space your text and justify it left and right. Once you’ve finished making the inside of your book as beautiful as you’d like it to be, don’t forget to save your file under a new name, otherwise it will be called “BookCover5x8_BW_400” or some variation of that. Saving your book properly If you print your book through IngramSpark, your book needs to be saved as a specific type of PDF. It’s called PDF/X-1a 2001. You can do this in Microsoft Word when you subscribe to Adobe DC and install their Word add-on. Here’s how: • Instead of “Save As”, “Print” your document. Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
• Choose “Adobe PDF” as your printer • Make sure the page size is correct – you may need to change it by choosing “PostScript Custom Page Size) under “More Paper Sizes” when you click the size that it will print.
• Click “Printer Properties” under the name of the printer. Then choose the third tab. • There you can choose what sort of PDF it should print. Choose the PDF/X-1a 2001 as shown here.
• Click on the “Paper Quality” tab to select “Black & White” rather than “Color”. • Click OK and then Print. It will ask you where to save the PDF and with what file name. I would recommend you giving it the name “BookTitle” POD.PDF so that you can find it easily again. Self-Publishing: Easy as ABC Meredith Bond www.anessabooks.com [email protected]
Your book cover This is a bit more tricky, because how you create it depends on which photo manipulation program you use to create your cover. I use Paint.net. It’s free and easy to use, once you’ve figured it out (ok, it’s got a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve found it to be a lot easier than GIMP, which is the other very popular free program). Naturally, the easiest way to create your cover would be to ask your cover artist to do it for you. Honestly, I would recommend that if it’s possible. They’ll deal with creating the sideways text that goes on the spine and find the appropriate art to go on the back underneath your blurb. You just need to make sure that the space for the bar code is left blank and that you have a PDF to upload to KDPP. If you do your cover yourself make sure that your picture extends all the way to the edge of the pink in the template and that no text falls beyond the dotted line:
Be sure that when you save your cover, you turn off the layer that has the template on it so that it doesn’t show. Save or print your cover as a PDF to upload to KDPP. And that’s it! You’re done!! You’ve formatted your book for both print and as an ebook. Well done!! Merry
Remember I can always be found: General Website: https://meredithbond.com Formatting: http://anessabooks.com Coaching: http://servesyouwrite.meredithbond.com