How This Book Was Made & How You Can Make Your Own (NEW EDITION)

By Maria B. O'Hare

IS: ‘HOW THIS BOOK WAS MADE’ FOR YOU?
Thank you for considering downloading this e-book – a book within a book, where the book itself explains as it goes along, how it was created so that you can easily create your own. By following the steps within this book, in the end you will be able to upload your book files to any of the main book distributors: E.g. KDP ( KINDLE PUBLISHING) and Smashwords/LULU who do all the other major online stores from: from the Apple i-store to Barnes & Noble (Nook) and KOBO to name but a few. This book will show you how: every step of the way.

This book uses the basic tools of word-processing that are most familiar to writers in general and will demonstrate how these same tools can be used to fully publish with complete creative and financial freedom as well as showing you how the related MS Office tools and their Open Office equivalent can be used to produce book covers without any previous know how of graphic design.

Basically, by the time you have worked your way through this ‘How To’ manual, you will know everything about doing the proper, professional formatting for an e-book, even with embedded images, along with its cover, so that it can be uploaded just about anywhere in the world for your potential readers to find with ease.

...Now Let’s Get Ready to...
....after you read this book of course....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maria B. O'Hare
• Release date: Sep 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370627400

Maria B. O'Hare

Although my main academic training is in Archaeology (PhD), as my research became increasingly independent, I began digging around some old dusty long forgotten archives and soon discovered that our current genetically-driven concept of evolutionary dynamics itself evolved and often, not by natural means. I began to realise that there had always been well-founded scientifically sound criticism of our Darwinian model and indeed, perfectly plausible alternatives, hence, as these exciting and much aligned alternatives are finally beginning to get the scientific recognition they have always deserved, I began writing about these in a blog entitled: digging up the future dot com This research and ongoing discoveries have made their way into several publications listed here (See the 'Little Book of Evolutionary Quotes', 'The Epigenetic Caterpillar: An Alternative View of the Peppered Moth Phenomenon', 'Lamarck and the Sad Tale of the Blind Cave Fish' and watch out for forthcoming book about D'Arcy Thompson's dynamic evolutionary model). Another related book - soon to be released, is entitled: 'Don't Count Your Children Until They've Had the Pox' which explores a very different form of non-genetic generational immunity using original death statistics from some of the deadliest contagions known to humankind with a focus on Ireland and comparing these with other developed nations. Other publications by the author range from self-publishing to science fiction dealing with a futuristic (evolutionary) genetics theme and are also published under the imprint: DiG-Press. See the full story of how I became a writer can be found at writing.ie https://www.writing.ie/tell-your-own-story/how-to-make-a-book-by-maria-b-ohare/ Cheers MariaBrigit

Book preview

HOW THIS BOOK WAS MADE INSIDE

‘W’= ‘WORD’-TYPE-DOC WAY

STEP ONE: Get Prepared for the Nuclear Option

Basically, the surest way to create a successful e-book formatted in a word document is to get rid of any previous formatting within your manuscript but keep the essential part: your words intact. This section will show you how and tell you why this is very important. So don’t do anything just yet, until you have read this part and see the other options.

Some call it the NUCLEAR method meaning to NUKE everything back to the text itself. This term and its meaning come from the style guide on Smashwords (one of the major global platforms for self-publishing e-books beyond Amazon KDP – Kindle Direct Publishing). It is well worth doing if you want to be certain that your uploadable file (for conversion to an e-book) is clean and free of nasty gremlins lurking behind MS Word’s software program – hidden junk that e-books simply do not like. Using this method means your MSS (manuscript) will have simple basic text – THE MANUSCRIPT stripped down to its bare bones.

Therefore, instead of spending loads of time making your manuscript look beautiful in ‘Word’ or its equivalent, or if it already looks beautiful, please be aware that your digital book will not reflect all your efforts unless you follow the steps below. This is because, a physical book or physical manuscript, being a fixed format where things are fixed on the page do not translate directly to the flowable text style found within most e-books (as used in this present book you are now reading).

It doesn’t matter whether you are reading it on a small i-phone screen or on a large computer monitor the text should flow and align and resize itself according to the e-reading device/app you are using. This is one of the main reasons why it is important to make a copy of your MSS (Manuscript) - which is outlined below so that you can do something quite different with the copy to make it work as a successful flowable text e-book to be read on any e-reader.

Now, there are some alternatives to this rather drastic method, so read on before doing anything. This is just preparing you for this method if you do need to NUKE your MSS.

STEP TWO: formatting a blank document

The following section outlines the methods directly used in the creation of this e-book’s interior layout and preparation for formatting.

Open up whatever word-processing program you normally work in (I specifically work in MS Office Word 2007, so, if you haven’t decided what to work with yet for your book project – this might be the easiest to start with as it is specific to the instructions below). If you are working on a later version or using its equivalent: the same principles apply (things may be slightly different and some tools in different places – just work with what is most comfortable or what you can access easily).

Select a new blank document by clicking on the ‘Start’ menu (it is usually at the bottom left of your screen) and you should see an icon for MS Word. Choose ‘New Blank Doc’ (or a blank document should open up automatically). This is the document that we will format specifically for a successful e-book and use to paste - in a special way- the copied manuscript MSS. First, we are simply going to prepare the blank document and give it some basic formatting before doing the pasting bit.

This is set up initially by selecting ‘Page Layout’ which should be visible on the main MENU view.

Go to ‘Size’ and by clicking the left mouse button (your cursor should be over the downward arrow beside ‘Size’) you should see options in a drop-down menu. Select A4 (it may already be highlighted as the default – this is normal, but at least you know where to change page sizes if you didn’t before). There is no particular size for e-books as the text is flowable – it aligns itself according to what device your readers are reading the book on (e.g. i-pad, i-phone, Kindle, PC/laptop etc), so it doesn’t matter that much which size you select. I use A4 as most of us know what that looks like.

Go to ‘Orientation’ displayed above ‘Size’ using the ‘Page Layout’ menu view. Click the left mouse button on the downward arrow to the side of ‘Orientation’ and choose: ‘Portrait’. Your word doc should automatically be set to this default – (portrait means that it is orientated like a portrait painting which just means the paper is longer than it is wide and landscape is wider than it is long like a landscape painting). You might use landscape only if you have a very unusual layout, but I would recommend just working in the normal Portrait orientation.

Go to ‘Margins’ (you should see a piece of paper with margin lines), again this is within the ‘Page Layout’ menu view and by clicking the left mouse button on the downward arrow beneath ‘Margins’, choose the narrowest margin icon (‘Narrow’ is written beside it and dimensions given). Margins can mean very little in E-book format (they just stop the words/images from filling the entire screen to the very extreme edge) and narrow seem to work best as they give you the greatest amount of text within a blank page. Just ignore ‘Columns’ unless you are just doing a PDF book or a fixed digital layout. For instance, in some parts of this book as I was doing the formatting, the margins were not even on both sides; however, this is not reflected in the e-book as hopefully, you can see.

Next, making sure that you return to the main menu ‘Home’, select ‘Change Styles’, which, has two large letter ‘A’s adjacent to boxes with AaBbCcDdEe written in them to the far right of the main menu view. By clicking (left mouse button unless stated otherwise) on the downward arrow next to ‘Change Styles’ you should see: ‘Style Set’. Click on this and a drop down menu should open up. Scroll down until you come to an option for: ‘Simple’. Select this as it makes life much simpler in the end. This is the master format for everything you do and set from now on; it is not an essential step, but it will keep things uncontaminated from strange automatic features. The essence of using Word to create e-books is to keep everything as simple as possible. This is a maxim of LULU: one of the four platforms we will be exploring in this book.

Note: Word is both wonderful and horrible at the same time as it can mess up the e-book in unexpected ways that you cannot see on the screen while you are creating the document making your book look awful in the e-book format. On the other hand, if you follow these simple steps and formatting experiments, you will never know how much grief you will have saved yourself and when you use the word doc method in this very particular way to create an e-book, it is, I have come to believe, the best way to produce them.

Alternatively, you could stop at this point and try uploading your manuscript for free with cover creation tools to Booktango who have a wide distribution which includes Amazon (Kindle). But, if you really want to have complete flexibility with your e-books – read on. Now that you have set the global formatting, you can start setting up the specifics for the ‘NORMAL’ pre-set formats (it should already be set at a default layout). If you type some random text directly into your blank document, the ‘Normal’ present should be highlighted in the main MENU – ‘Home’ view – (note the letters: AaBbCcDd’ with ‘Normal’ written underneath).

We could experiment with this features by writing a full paragraph or two (type something encouraging to help you achieve your publishing goals) and highlight this text. By clicking with your left mouse button at the beginning of the paragraph and still holding the button, drag the cursor to the end of the paragraph. Release the button and the whole text should be in blue. If it isn’t completely highlighted (in blue), then repeat. You may have inadvertently released it or click on a white space. Any formatting changes that you make while this text is highlighted will change all of the highlighted text and even text that you haven’t yet highlighted. Make sure the ‘Normal’ pre-set box is also highlighted above in the main menu view.

Just play around with formatting this small paragraph or two of text and see what you can do with it until you are fully familiar with the different text layout and style options. Some of you might already be quite familiar with these formats, but, it is a useful exercise to get familiar with the nuances of the pre-sets and how they work best for e-books.

You could use ‘justified’ as an alignment rather than centered /right or left-aligned as this book has used for most of the main body of text. I aligned it to ‘Justified’ by simply selecting a single paragraph at this early stage (prior to doing any other distinct text and headings etc) and made sure that the pre-set ‘Normal’ was highlighted. I then set the Font Size to 12Pt. You could use 11 Pt, but I wouldn’t select anything much smaller than 10 Pt for the main body of text. This present book also used Times New Roman for the Font Face and line spacing was set to 1.5.

You can simply change a single piece or small section of ‘Normal’ text manually at any time, by selecting and highlighting the specific text you want to look a bit different from the rest by using the formatting tools in the ‘Home’ view menu (not in the ‘Normal’ pre-set menu) and only the selected text will change leaving the rest as it was originally formatted. You could highlight all your text and by reformatting it, all of the highlighted text will