E-Book Formatting for Novelists: A step-by-step guide for the independent novelist or small press
By K.C. May
3/5
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About this ebook
You’ve written a novel. Congratulations! Now you want to sell it as an e-book online at Amazon and other ebook retailers. You have three choices:
Upload a .doc or .rtf file and hope for the best.
Hire someone to format it for you.
Learn to format it yourself.
This intermediate-level guide for Microsoft Windows users is intended to help you do it yourself. If you use a Mac, this guide may or may not help you.
This book assumes you have a comfortable, working knowledge of Windows, that you know how to download and install software, create text files and perform operations like copy/paste, search/replace and so forth. Familiarity with Microsoft Word styles is highly recommended.
K.C. May
Hi! I'm K.C. May. Thanks for visiting my author page. I grew up in the mid-western USA and in Hawaii, and earned a B.A. in Russian from Florida State University. After a year in Taiwan teaching English and studying Mandarin Chinese, I lived in the Arizona desert where I founded a Rottweiler rescue organization and worked as a computer programmer and technical writer. My interests include karate, backpacking, motorcycle riding, dog training, and computer gaming. In 2010, I retreated to cooler, greener Georgia. I earn my living as a full-time writer. My first novel, The Kinshield Legacy, was initially published in hard-cover in 2005. Now it's available as an eBook and in paperback. It was named one of the four best reads of 2010 by review blogger Grace Krispy at DailyCheapReads.com. If you enjoy that book, you will probably like the rest of the series -- The Kinshield Saga. I also write science fiction, and I've started a new series called The Mindstream Chronicles. I hope you enjoy my stories!
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E-Book Formatting for Novelists - K.C. May
Introduction
Chapter vignetteYou’ve written a novel. Congratulations! Now you want to sell it as an e-book online at Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, and/or Barnes & Noble. You have four choices:
Upload a .doc or .rtf file and hope for the best.
Hire someone to format it for you.
Use a 3rd party tool*.
Learn to format it yourself.
*Some authors have reported that ebooks formatted with certain 3rd party tools sometimes look terrible on Amazon's Look Inside.
Why chance it when you can format the ebooks yourself and be confident they look great?
This guide is intended to help you do it yourself. I use Microsoft Windows exclusively. If you use a Mac, this guide may or may not help you. I recommend consulting Guido Henkel’s guide at http://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-pride-in-your-e-book-formatting/, as it is written for Mac users.
This book assumes you have a comfortable, working knowledge of Windows, that you know how to download and install software, create text files and perform operations like copy/paste, search/replace and so forth. If you lack these basic skills, you might find these instructions frustrating. I suggest you go through a course or How-To guide for Windows before you start the process of formatting an ebook.
If you write non-fiction or poetry, this guide may or may not help you. It’s intended for novel writers, who use similar formatting. If you’re comfortable with styles and HTML, you can adapt the instructions to work for the kinds of text styles you work with.
This probably goes without saying, but please have your well-revised book edited by a qualified editor before publishing it. Publishing first draft
material has the potential of ruining an author’s reputation.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
Assembling the tools
Chapter vignetteThe best way I’ve found to format e-books requires a few software tools, all of which are free. If you don’t already have these programs, download and install them before you start.
Open Office: get this from http://download.openoffice.org/index.html. Alternatively, you can use Libre Office which you get from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/. It is essentially the same as Open Office.
Kindle Previewer: this isn’t the same as Kindle for PC. Get it from http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621. Be sure to scroll down to where it says Download Kindle Previewer x.x (currently 2.94).
Calibre e-book Management: get it at https://calibre-ebook.com/. This program is freeware, which means you are free to use it as needed, but if you find value in it, consider making a donation
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