How to Proofread: EBook Formatting: An Indie Author's Guide, #1

By Sandie Giles

How to Proofread: EBook Formatting is the first in a series of updates to the original How to Proofread Your Own Writing. The new format will take the form of four mini, indie author guides, each covering a specific area of proofreading your own writing.
This book, updated to encompass the changes in technology since the original volume, will guide you through how to find errors in the formatting of your eBook, at the same time as highlighting the correct formats you should be using when crafting the design. It also focuses on a number of issues you might not have considered before, such as how imported graphics look on the different coloured backgrounds now available, and the effect long strings of hyphenated words can have on the look of your eBook.
This guide will only available as an eBook, as it is the only way to effectively highlight issues that may appear in the digital format.
Read How to Proofread: EBook Formatting now and learn how to recognise your eBook formatting errors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandie Giles
• Release date: Jan 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524281342

Book preview

HOW TO PROOFREAD

EBook Formatting

An Indie Author’s Guide

Copyright © 2016 Sandie Giles

All rights reserved.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover image

© Maximinogomes | Dreamstime.com

Introduction

This book is one of a series of updates to the original How to Proofread Your Own Writing. All the sections of the original book will eventually be available as standalone books, where each one is focused on a single area of the topic of proofreading your own writing. With these new books, you will be able to pick and choose which topics you think are applicable to you and only purchase those. Where topics overlap, they will be covered in each of the relevant books.

In this particular book, changes and additions to the text have been included to reflect the changes in eBook publishing over the last few years. EBooks have moved on, both in the technology available and in reader expectations, and best practice has been refined. It is important for all of us to keep up with these changes. I hope you enjoy reading this book and find it useful in your goal of creating a well-designed and proofread eBook.

For those who haven’t read the original book and are wondering why there is a book on formatting your eBook covered under the topic of proofreading, formatting is a big part of the proofreading process. Formatting is important in making your book attractive, readable and normal. Normal is important. If your book doesn’t conform to what people expect to see, they can be taken out of the text to wonder why — especially bad when your book is a novel. Get your formatting right and that is less likely to happen. Checking your formatting should not be skipped over.

Formatting an eBook correctly is very different from formatting a print book. There are guides available from several of the major eBook retailers giving you specifics about their version of formatting. The rules are there so that your book displays correctly on an eReader or a reading app. If you don’t follow those rules, then your book could look a complete mess. Even if you do follow all the specifications to the letter, you can still get glitches in your book. In order to avoid these glitches, you need to proofread the formatting of your eBook by looking at the converted version, ie what the reader will see when they purchase your book.

One of the best things you can do to learn what works and what doesn’t, is to read a lot of eBooks yourself. That will give you the chance to see the problems first-hand — and almost every eBook has a problem. Even the best formatted eBook is at the mercy of unforeseen technology issues. If you don’t read eBooks, you won’t know the issues. This is one of the reasons why I have decided that this book will only be available in eBook format. Reading about eBook problems in a print book makes no sense, even though I tried it in the original version. You need to be able to see the problems and experiment with the eReader/apps capabilities at the same time.

Even if you have already read lots of eBooks and you’ve seen the problems, you still might not know what caused them or how to solve them. This book will help you to identify potential causes. You will end up with a checklist of things to look out for, which will eventually become second nature to you. It will also help you with some of the formatting issues and questions you might come across while creating your eBook and highlight issues you might not even have thought about.

Throughout the book there are mentions of technical elements for creating certain features in your eBook, such as indents. This book is about checking for formatting errors and how to recognise them. It assumes you have read all the formatting guides and know what you should be doing.

And finally, as with the original book, this book has been entirely proofread by me in order to give you a good idea of how easy (or not) it is to do it yourself. Proofreading formatting is different from proofreading text. I would expect the majority of people to be able to learn to proofread the formatting of their eBook. If you’re technologically-minded enough to prepare and upload an eBook by yourself, you should be able to cope with what is in this book. And even if you’re not, you’ll be able to query elements of your eBook