E-Book Formatting: How to Create an EPUB for Kindle and Other Self-Publishing Platforms: Location Independent Series, #6

By Jeff Blum

The self-publishing journey isn't always easy or cheap. Some things—like editing and cover design—should be left to paid professionals, but you can save money and achieve great results formatting your own e-book.

 

DIY e-book formatting may seem daunting, but new tools—paid and free—make it fairly easy for most fiction manuscripts. These tools are discussed early in this guide so you will have a short read if one of them works for you.

 

If your manuscript is more complicated (e.g., a nonfiction book with tables, list items, images, footnotes, and other specially formatted elements), this guide will explain everything you need to produce a professional and pleasing e-book. Advanced formatting is accomplished with HTML and CSS, but you won't need any prior experience or knowledge of either of these as the guide includes a tutorial to teach you everything you need to know.

 

The end result of using this book will be a well-formatted EPUB e-book that can be submitted to Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Nook, and any other e-book publishing platform (NOTE: if you are looking at other guides that mention needing a MOBI file for Amazon, you are looking at an outdated guide as that is no longer best practice).

 

Here are some specific things that you will get from reading this book.

• A discussion of some useful tools, including Atticus, BBEdit, BlueGriffon, Calibre, Draft2Digital, Jutoh, Kindle Create, Kindle Previewer, LibreOffice Writer, Notepad++, Online HTML editors, Reedsy Book Editor, and Vellum.
• Pluses and minuses of using Microsoft Word.
• How to create a standard, clickable table of contents.
• How to create a "logical" table of contents (used for the "Go To" menu or sidebar on your e-reading device or app).
• HTML and CSS (styling) basics and a look at specific issues that are relevant to e-books and Amazon Kindle e-books in particular.
• A template with HTML and CSS code that should work for any type of book formatting need.
• How to create "standard" paragraph styles for different types of books.
• How to add drop caps or small caps to your initial chapter paragraphs.
• How to format complex elements such as internal and external links, images, tables, list items, block quotations, special fonts, and more.
• How to create a final EPUB document (with proper metadata and cover art) from your original document or from an HTML version.
• How to check your final EPUB for errors before submitting to online publishers.
• An appendix summarizing the author's personal process to use as a quick checklist reference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Blum
• Release date: Oct 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201298296

Book preview

List of External Links

external links

liseries.com/e-book-formatting

Introduction

Formatting your manuscript to publish as an e-book can vary from a simple process for a text-only novel with chapter headings to a complicated process for something with many images, list items, tables, block quotations, internal links, footnotes, etc. Where you wish to publish (Amazon only or multiple platforms) may also affect things.

I’ll explain the different options in this guide but the end result should be a reflowable EPUB document that displays correctly on a variety of different screens with your text flowing and wrapping neatly. You will then use this EPUB document to submit to all publishers, including Amazon.

If your book has straightforward, text-only formatting, your job may be fairly easy and you may not need to read the majority of this guide.

If your book’s formatting is somewhat complicated, one of the tools I will discuss below may be all you need to use.

If the simplest methods don’t produce a good result for your formatting needs, you will need to get into HTML and CSS. If you don’t know anything about those terms and/or they sound intimidating, fear not. The basics aren’t that complicated and I’ll do my best to walk you through everything you need to know. I also provide a ready-to-use template that will make things easier.

What you will read below is the result of my personal experience and research. Surprisingly, I was unable to come across one master online tutorial covering everything I needed to know and much of what I did find was outdated so I had to spend too many hours piecing things together from here and there and experimenting with different tools and options. Hopefully this will save you from that hassle.

I will go into a lot of detail that may or may not be useful to your formatting needs. Just skip whatever does not apply and don’t worry if some details seem confusing or hard to remember. At the end I offer an appendix to summarize my personal formatting workflow.

Before You Start

Although you can make small edits after you start the formatting process, it isn’t recommended and larger edits may require you to re-start the entire process so make sure your manuscript is in its final form (edited and error free). Below are a few specific things to consider.

Front and End Matter

Make sure you have included your front and end matter if appropriate. And don’t blindly follow online advice for what belongs in the front and what belongs in the back that are relics of traditional publishing. Since most e-book retailers allow readers to sample your book (typically the first 10%), ask yourself if you want that preview cluttered with front matter. The answer is probably no, in which case you should move most of it to the end of the book.

Headings

Set any chapter and section headings as a relevant heading type in your writing tool. I recommend Heading 1 for chapters and lower level headings for sections and sub-sections. This will greatly aid your formatting and conversion process.

External Links

Make sure you have no links to Amazon inside the EPUB version you plan to submit to non-Amazon publishers as they can be sensitive about that. If you do include Amazon links, the last I checked you are not allowed to include affiliate links. I’m not sure if that rule is actually enforced or not, but better safe than sorry.

Table of Contents (TOC)

Having a table of contents is standard practice, useful for readers, and required by Amazon for Kindle e-book submissions. There are two ways to create one: in your writing tool (all the major tools offer this feature) or when you convert your book to an EPUB. I don’t have a strong opinion about which option is better but here are a few things to consider.

All of the conversion options I will discuss in this book will allow you to create a table of contents. The specialized online formatting tools (discussed later) add one automatically so creating your own in your writing tool is not recommended. The other conversion options make creating a table of contents optional. You may wish to experiment to see how easy or difficult the process is and how you like the results.

When working with HTML there is a possibility of problems with the internal links so using Calibre (discussed later) to add a table of contents during conversion may be safer.

If your book has a