• Know parts of an ebook when creating one
When creating an ebook, thinking about its basic parts can be very useful. While some elements of an ebook are the same as that of a paper books, others do differ. Knowing those differences can save you time when creating an ebook and allows you to create a better book by utilizing the format’s advantages.
• Getting started with formatting your ebook
If you have a completed manuscript, you actually should to format two ebooks – one for Kindle Direct Publishing and one for Draft2Digital. This actually is less work than it sounds as you can format an ebook that will work for both Kindle and Draft2Digital.
• How to link your ebook’s table of contents
Though the table of contents is one of the first pages readers will see, it’s one of the last you’ll actually complete. Because it must perfectly match the names of your various sections and chapters, as well as have the correct page numbers (if doing a print book anyway), it is always in flux as you write and format the book.
• How to create page breaks in your ebook
When creating an ebook that you’re self-publishing, you want it to appear as professional as possible. Appearance, of course, certainly is no substitute for content. Still, a good, reader-friendly layout can make the ebook easier to follow.
• Skip headers, footers, page numbers in ebook
Among the most common novice writers formatting their ebooks run into is including headers, footers and page numbers in their manuscript. Unfortunately, this often leads to the book’s title, author’s name, and page numbers appearing in the middle of the text on an ereader.
• How to format line spacing for an ebook
One of the common problems indie authors run into when formatting their ebook text is line spacing. This is the amount of space between lines and paragraphs.
• Use consistent style on chapter, header titles
When writing chapter titles and section headers in nonfiction books, you’ll want to use a consistent style. For example, if one section title is written as What Hiking Apparel to Buy for Children, but the next one is written as Where to buy hiking apparel, the styles are inconsistent as the former is capitalized but the latter is lowercased.
• Add page breaks to mark ebook’s chapters
Readers of paper books have come to expect that a new chapter begins on a new page, even if that means blank white space at the bottom of the page where the last chapter ended. As all of us live in an era where paper books still are part of our education and recreation, we want to emulate this nonverbal signal to readers when designing ebooks.
• Consider exercising ‘nuclear option’ on ebook
You’ve formatted your ebook in MS Word and uploaded it to Kindle DP or Smashwords. When you open the online previewer to see how it looks, you’re surprised to see tons of odd line breaks, strange characters that weren’t in your original Word document, uneven indentations, and a plethora of other problems. So you go through your manuscript, fix them, and upload again. To your frustration, you find that many of the errors remain – and maybe even some new ones crop up.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.
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