Indenting paragraphs for kdp8/11/2023 Let me stress, doing this is really important. Read Chapter 6 of my free self-publishing guide – Let’s Get Digital – if you haven’t figured out the best way to lay out all your front matter and end matter, in particular those reader requests. This latter point is really, really important and will have a massive influence on how successful you are. Which makes it the perfect time to ask them for something, whether that’s a purchase of Book 2, a sign-up, a review, a website visit, or a social follow. I call this Peak Reader Love moment because a reader will never have a more positive opinion of you than the moment they finish your book – presuming you have done your job as a writer. Calls-to-ActionĪll these reader requests are known as CTAs – calls-to-action – and they are crucial to an author’s success. Everything bar the table of contents, which we will handle separately (delete it from your manuscript, if you made one yourself). All that stuff should be laid out exactly how you want it to appear to readers. Make sure your front and end matter is exactly how you want it to appear in the e-book – your title/copyright page, any About the Author page, any links to your mailing list, other books, website, social channels, and a place where readers can review your book. The process of formatting an ebook takes your manuscript and freezes it in place as-is, so make sure it is edited and error free and that you are 100% done fiddling, or else it’s all the way back to the start of this process again - which you really won’t want to do, believe me. I also recommend this book from Karen Inglis if you want a full guide to publishing and marketing children’s books, and this guest post she wrote for this here site too. Hiring a pro is probably best here but if you want to explore the specialist approach of formatting your own children’s books then check out this post from Darcy Pattinson. A Specific Note for Children’s Authorsįormatting children’s books are a special challenge andI don’t recommend the below method. You should have a much easier time of it than the PC army, from what I hear about TextWrangler. Don’t swear at me I don’t have a Mac and you actually have a much better piece of software (and an easier time formatting your books).Ĭheck out TextWrangler, and follow along as best you can – I think it will be easy enough, I’m just flagging it in case some steps are slightly different for you. That first time is a bear though! You have been warned. And it doesn’t take much “practice” to reach that point. It could even take longer! But after doing this a few times, you’ll be able to whizz through the process in an hour or less. It might take you a whole day to do this the first time. It’s a useful skill, if you are willing to work through the many frustrations that will accompany your first efforts. I can fix errors at the drop of a hat, fiddle with my end matter to my heart’s content, and I could even hang out my shingle as an ebook formatter now, if I needed a side-hustle. Be warned! That said, I actually love formatting my own ebooks I find it weirdly soothing. It becomes much less of a head melter after you first format an ebook successfully, but you will be tearing your hair out that first time. You will need a fair bit of patience to get through the DIY formatting process. But over time, I started making more and more notes about where I was deviating from the path Guido had charted out, so I thought I’d now publish that here in case it’s useful for anyone.Īfter clocking up ten years’ experience making my own ebooks, I do a few things differently – but these are predominantly stylistic preferences, or my preferred best practices in terms of ebook layout, or the odd policy change from Amazon here and there. I relied on that series for many years as I built my first ebooks. This is my own personal process for formatting an ebook, but it does draw heavily on a series of blog posts Guido Henkel wrote in 2010, which you can still find here. If you want a guide to ebook formatting written by a true expert, then check out Guido Henkel’s Zen of eBook Formatting. I don’t want to dissuade any of the adventurous types wishing to format their own books but a word of caution is appropriate.īefore we get into this, I’m not a professional ebook formatter. hiring a pro or using a tool – check out my free guide to self-publishing which has specific advice and recommendations on that. Here’s an overview of the process:Īnd if you are seeking information on the other two approaches instead – i.e. This guide to ebook formatting covers the third option – the DIY approach. You have three options when it comes to formatting an ebook:
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