OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
One of the fantastic rewards of writing a book is being able to hold a physical copy in our hands. Regardless of other definitions of success, the thrill never goes away.
I get asked this question a lot: “Can I use my CreateSpace PDF for the ebook version?”
The simple answer is ‘no’. Well, you could, but I doubt you’d be very happy with the finished results — and more importantly, neither would your readers. Frankly, a PDF is the last format you should use to create an ebook from as it does so many things that you just don’t want an ebook to do.
Flow vs rigid formatting
With a printed book, you want to control as much as you possibly can, from how the text aligns to the headers at the tops of the pages to where the page numbers sit on the page: that all needs to be exact to provide the best printed reading experience you can for your readers.
Ebooks, on the other hand, need to flow. You’ve no idea what the person reading your book is reading it on, much less whether they use really small text or enlarge it so they can read it easily. Even if all you format your book for is the Kindle platform, each model varies in the way it displays the written word.
If your book doesn’t adjust to that, they’re not going to enjoy reading it.
You can see from these three examples how different even the Kindle platform is when each device displays the book differently.
Ebooks are basically created using hypertext, the same language that web pages use to format content for the internet, albeit with fewer options for styling the text for the viewer. (No, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to learn HTML to set out your book, it just means you need to think differently about how you do it.)
The key for ebooks is about ‘flow’: how does your text look when you enlarge the font size on your reading device? What happens when it gets smaller? The pages reformat themselves automatically to fit the screen of the device and your book needs to do that, too. This is the main reason page numbers are pretty much worthless on an ereader — how do you know what page it is if the text has reflowed to fit the screen or the needs of the reader?
Minimal formatting
Your printed book looks great on paper, but that’s because a lot of effort has gone into making it fit the page, not to mention all the other work that goes into setting a book out for the printed page. Not so with ebooks – if anything you want less control.
The key to a successful ebook is to minimise the amount of additional formatting: that means no funky fonts, no weird margins and try to avoid tables or other text constructs in your copy that require a specific format.
I know, I know, “it looks so much better if that funny bit is in Comic Sans” — trust me, nothing looks better in Comic Sans. And if you want to keep your reader interested, you need to make the reading experience as easy for them as possible.
Keep formatting to a minimum. This means that rather than use an unusual font that isn’t supported by a lot of devices, go for bolding a basic font or use italics instead. If you have to use a different font, put it in a graphic. That way you can control the look and feel without resorting to embedding unusual fonts or anything else that will look bad on an ereader screen.
Sure you can indent a paragraph, just don’t try to lock it into a particular size or style at the same time. Don’t use drop caps as that’s another option that will just cause problems.
First tip: keep it simple. By that I mean take out any text formatting that is going to cause the reader problems with your book.
Graphics
Photos or other images need to be high resolution for a print book – at least 300 dpi – it’s just the way printers work and the best way to get good results from your printed book. Graphics for ebooks, on the other hand, only need to be screen resolution.
So the simple explanation is that graphics need to be resized. Don’t worry, this is done by a lot of the converters out there, so it’s not a huge worry, but if you use a lot of images, I would recommend resizing them yourself before you put them in the ebook to avoid complications later. And by all means, keep them to a minimum.
Tip: keep images to a minimum and resize them before you submit your ebook.
Page breaks
Page breaks or section breaks are important in print and ebooks, as they keep chapters from flowing into each other and separate text you don’t want flowing on from a previous text block. Use them.
One of the worst crimes in terms of manuscript formatting I’ve seen is the use of paragraph returns to separate pages. I spend a good portion of my life taking paragraph returns out of manuscripts. So don’t do it. That’s what page and section breaks are for. I prefer section breaks between chapters because that’s more useful than a simple page break and provides a better standard of break.
Tip: use section breaks between chapters.
File formats
Okay, you’ve got your file ready for publication in print, so now what? That print file is a good place to start, just remember that you’ll need to simplify it for your ebook. It’s probably too complicated and not necessarily laid out in the right order to suit your electronic version.
For your ebook, you need to get it into the right format for the device you’re planning to publish on. The most popular version of format is the ‘.epub’ file format. Yes, I know, Kindle Direct Publishing until recently preferred a ‘.mobi’ file format (don’t write in), but they will now accept an unbundled .epub file, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Personally, I always submit a .mobi file to KDP as I know where it’s been. By that, I mean that it is formatted in such a way that nine times out of ten I can predict how it’s going to behave.
This is probably the most common question I get asked: “How do I convert my book to the right format?” The straight answer is there is no simple way to do it that will guarantee you the best results. I usually code my books by hand until they’re ready to be made into an epub file, then convert them to .mobi for Kindle.
“How do I get my book into a .mobi format?”, I can hear you ask? Well, that’s the difficult part. No one has yet come up with an easy way to generate a .mobi file, although it’s easy enough to convert a file with a shareware app like Calibre. I find that Calibre’s conversion is a bit too rough and doesn’t always compile the files correctly.
A simple way to get to an .epub is to import a modern Microsoft Word file (.docx) into Calibre and then convert it to the epub format. You will need to add a table of contents and either link them to bookmarks for each of your chapters via the Hyperlink function or produce the file on a PC which will allow you to embed the links as HTML. Why the Mac version doesn’t do this, I don’t know.
Once I’ve got the epub file, I put the book through Kindle’s free application KindleGen on the Mac to convert it to a .mobi file. This isn’t something I’d recommend for everyone, as it uses Apple’s Terminal application and does take a bit of know-how of the Unix command line to do this kind of conversion.
If you’re converting to a .epub file, I would recommend Calibre as the results for that conversion have been pretty good for me. Once you’ve produced an epub file, you need to see if it validates by using something like ePub Checker or use an online validator to test it. If it doesn’t pass the checks, it won’t be a submittable file. And it won’t always give you enough information about what is wrong with the file.
There are a number of places to look for advice online but I’d recommend Mobile Read for general advice and great forums, Joel Friedlander is always a good source (here he talks about decision making when producing your ebook) and this blog entry has some great resources, too. Oh, and Joel Friedlander has just added a new kind of template that allows you to do both versions from the same file.
I know Joanna uses Scrivener to compile her ebooks and is happy with the results, but again, it takes a bit of work to get it to come out correctly to the standard you want. Personally, I don’t like giving that control up – hey, I’m a control freak with a perfectionist streak, what can I say?
Alternatively, you can always pay someone like me to do the conversion, so you don’t have to or you can submit a Word file that you’ve reformatted to be as simple as possible, to KDP or one of the others and hope for the best.
The end result
This is what you’re looking for: a file that passes KDP or any other ebook platform’s checks to get your book published. It’s not an easy job and if you’ve seen a badly formatted ebook, you know exactly what I mean.
The final tip I’d give is to do the best you can to make sure your book provides a great reading experience for the reader.
And I can help!
If this all this seems too daunting, I can help you produce the best ebook for your project. And I’m reasonable!
You can find more information on the services I provide at www.gunboss.com or contact me through the form on the site.
Dean Fetzer is the author of four thrillers, a former pub reviewer and has been a graphic designer for more than 20 years, designing for print and then the internet before naturally moving into book design.
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1 2 Next »I confess I've been putting off learning about the formatting because it feels a bit overwhelming. I'll go to the links you provided. It's time, and your explanation makes it seem a little less daunting. :)
Thanks Robyn, let me know if you have any questions.
Dean
Very good post. A lot of new authors will think nothing of shelling out hundreds of dollars for a POD publisher and pull their hair out by the end of the process because of all the formatting issues you have to deal with then freak out when it comes to e-books. It's actually easier to publish an e-book and a lot less frustrating.
Thanks Allen, yes, it's SOUNDS scary, but it isn't really. It just takes a bit of work!
Cheers,
Dean
Great article. So true about minimizing the format for ebooks. Scrivener is a good program to write and edit an eBook (and will compile adequately for epub file) and I use it too. Calibre is a good program to check the eBook, in both epub and mobi format, or to convert quickly, and I use it when I want to read and edit, but there may be straggling formatting so I would never use this file to load my ebook for sale sites. A person can tinker with the file, but why bother when you have Jutoh.
Jutoh is a great program to format eBooks. Jutoh can compile all formats. It cleans out unnecessary formatting, builds the TOC, allows you to add pictures and links, adds & embeds meta data, and also runs an epub checker which enables you to create flawless files. It creates mobipocket files that will load direct into Amazon. I used it and was very happy with the results. You can also convert your file into epub, html, a word doc, etc. It's not free, but doesn't cost much, around $40 US.
For those who want to take formatting on - Check it out here http://jutoh.com/
I'm coming at this from the opposite direction. I've been building websites for years, and an epub is essentially a zipped-up website. So when I was faced with a need to juggle chapters and sections around seamlessly--a capability that did not at that time exist in Word--I converted my nascent manuscript to html and wrote the whole thing in epub format. All 400 odd (some *very* odd) pages of it!
But this experience stood me in good stead when it came to producing a polished ebook. One thing that I found is that Calibre, for all its usefulness, is woefully inadequate when it comes to conversion to any form that Amazon will recognize. I still use it to produce ARCs for reviews, but for nothing else.
You're actually better off putting in a bit of time and effort into learning to work with source files in Sigil, an opensource epub program. From there, you can style your book using stylesheets and produce classy, polished ebooks that play well with almost any platform. Yes, there is a learning curve, but the result is complete freedom from Word-to-epub, or even Scrivener-to-epub conversion programs. You control every aspect of your book's look and feel, from character spacing in headings to how different devices display hyphenation.
Liberating? You bet!
And no, it is not as overwhelming as it sounds.
Good points, Yael - I too, have that kind of coding background and yes, it makes a strange kind of sense to the likes of us. I don't recommend it for everyone, as if you don't have a head for it, it can be overwhelming.
While I have tried Sigil, I can't really say it worked for me, but I'll have another look.
Thanks for your comments!
Dean
Dean, if you have [HTML] coding background and don't really like to work with Sigil, I would recommend to look into 'Jutoh'. Sure, Jutoh isn't for free — like Sigil — but it's a eBook compiler with professional qualities. It's well worth the investment, and available for Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Another vote for Sigil here (and I also have a web design background, lol). The one thing I've found very irritating though is the weird standard formatting you get when you paste text into the WYSIWYG view. But I use a workaround now where I convert my word doc into clean html using a free online tool and then stick the html in there in the code view and I'm done. Then just a matter of tweaking the css and I know exactly how everything will look in most ereaders.
x2 Sigil. Love it, although development on it has stopped. I find the current version as stable as anything else out there.
The Kindle Previewer is a free download from Amazon that could be a great first step for those hesitant to jump all the way in at the deep end. Download that and use it a first step. It offers simulators for all of the screen sizes that Amazon offers.
Kindle Previewer will also convert files for you, something I am amazed was not mentioned in the article here. Feed it a .epub and get a .mobi in the combined .mobi/.k8 formats. No messing with the terminal required. You can also feed it .odt and .html files.
My workflow uses LibreOffice. I edit in native .odt files, using custom paragraph styles from an editing template, when the work is done I import that file into another template, one for PDF CreateSpace output. I also output the file as .html, clean it up a bit in a text editor, then import into Sigil. A bit of tweaking there, then I open the .epub file in Kindle Previewer. This gives me PDF, .epub, and .mobi.
Thanks Dean, this is a great start to formatting. I know when I started doing ebooks I learned how to add special fonts and graphics, dropcaps, etc...
Then I noticed none of the mainstream publishers used anything fancy; just bare-bones, text only. My books would often have problems on some obscure ebook distributing site because ebooks don't display the same everywhere. I rarely do them now (I have people for that) and for my own books I'm still really tempted to add flair or style, but it almost always backfires. Now I tell authors: Make the print book look nice; make the ebook work and not break down or shift around strangely.
I also have not done anything fancy, but my faith in the ability of ereaders, both hard and soft, to do a good job with well formed CSS has come a long way.
My next projects include some fancy touches, all via CSS. I think things are moving in a good way when it comes to an ereader's ability to render based on good CSS.
I think formatting for the lowest common denominator, which I have always disliked but conceded was necessary, is starting to move up a bit!
my .02
JJB
Hi Derek,
Well, with all the varying formats for ereaders, it's far easier to produce a simple file without a lot of frills that works for everything - and yes, keep it simple for ebooks and control the way the print book looks.
Obviously, things are always changing so this may get better. We'll have to wait and see.
Cheers,
Dean
Excellent post, as usual. I actually really enjoy formatting e-books. I used to do a lot of HTML in middle school and a ton of e-book formatting is very similar to the HTML principles I taught myself. It's a lot to absorb at first, but is very fascinating.
Question: what do you mean by "paragraph returns"? Probably a silly question but I'm not 100% certain what you mean. :)
Hi Natalie
Paragraph returns are simply when you hit the enter key to go to the next paragraph. If you put your manuscript into word and use the 'show' function, you'll see the little blue P's that show a paragraph return.
The general rule of thumb is any more than a couple between blocks of text makes things look funny! So using a bunch to separate chapters will skew things in your ebook. Instead, add in a section break during formatting. :)
Hi Natalie,
Yes, as Michael says, it's the spaces that are added through using the 'return' key - it invariably adds too much space and isn't used for most book formatting. If you want to add space, there are much better ways to do it.
If you do ebook formatting with html/xml, then the usually adds enough space, unless you take it out with the css styling.
Hope that makes sense,
Dean
This is a great post stressing the importance of functionality on all reading devices rather than trying to exert complete control of pagination on a print book. Thank you for composing. I think a lot of indie authors "get it", but many professionals from the traditional publishing industry still think InDesign is the only way to go for eBook conversion and don't understand why they don't have fixed backgrounds and page numbers.
Thanks Paul,
I think things are improving, it's just that a lot of people producing ebooks try and control everything, much the way they do with print books and it's just not possible.
But, like the internet, I'm sure ereaders will catch up and things will improve.
Cheers,
Dean
This was really interesting, thank you. I spend my life dealing with those returns instead of page and section breaks (not to mention "tabs" made with spaces), as an editor, so it's nice to see other people talking about that, too!
Thanks Liz - yes, poor formatting is the bane of my existence! Glad to hear it's not just me!
Dean
Hi Dean
Great post, thanks
I'm with Jo on this. Having no formatting experience and finding HTML and all things coding a little scary, I love Scrivener! I trawled through the Scrivener guide and the Smashwords guide and now produce what I think are pretty good looking manuscripts.
There are the occasional sacrifices you have to make, but as you said, functional simplicity is the key for most ebooks, so I haven't found anything I desperately want to do that I can't using Scrivener.
Also, more on the print book side of things, I've recently formatted my first using a template from Joel Freelander's template company and it was a pleasure and looks great :)
cheers
Mike
Thanks Michael, and thanks for the update on Joel Friedlander's templates - I have heard good things about them, just haven't used them yet.
Cheers,
Dean