Making Digital Books: Formatting and Selling Your Novels and Stories as Ebooks
Published by Michael Jasper at Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Jasper
Cover image by Phspy, Dreamstime.com
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Formatting Your Ebooks
Formatting Your Novel (or Story) for Smashwords
Formatting Your Novel (or Story) for the Kindle
Formatting Your Novel (or Story) for the Nook
Formatting Your Novel for Print-on-Demand (PoD)
Formatting Your Novel for the Google ebookstore
Formatting Your Novel for DriveThruFiction
Adding the Fancy Stuff to Your Ebook
Choosing a Distribution Strategy for Your Ebooks
Writing Great Descriptions for Your Ebooks
Creating Effective Ebook Covers
So what's all the fuss about digital books, better known as ebooks? Why should you—as a writer—be interested in making ebooks?
Ebook readers have become much less expensive and more user-friendly. Nowadays, readers find themselves happy to buy a $4 or $5 file to load onto their new ereader instead of shelling out $30 for a stack of paper bound up in a cover (both of which tell the same story).
The big change in how folks are reading and buying books started in 2008 and 2009, and in a few years, I think the split between digital and print versions of novels, stories, and comics, will be equal.
Although I’ll probably be wrong. I have a hunch that the popularity and sales of ebooks will overtake print books, and we’ll never look back. Print books will still survive, but I think they’ll be more of a specialty purchase, like a collectible almost, sort of like coffee table books are now. And some folks will always prefer print books. And that’s just fine with me. I know how to make ‘em both ways.
It looks like ebooks are here to stay. So if you’re a writer, you should take advantage of this, and get your work into digital format. This ebook of mine will help you do just that.
Making digital books out of your novels and stories is a great way to reach new readers, and hopefully, make some extra money as well. Who doesn’t want that?
Back to the Table of Contents
Part 1: Formatting Your Ebooks
Formatting Your Novel (or Story) for Smashwords
So here we go with our adventure in making digital books.
Please note—I’m organizing these topics a little bit out of order, chronologically. I probably should’ve started with writing and then copy-editing your book (you're on your own there!), creating an eye-catching cover, and writing a great description for your ebook. And then jump into choosing a digital distributor to help you sell your ebooks. And finally, talk about marketing your ebooks.
But I wanted writers who were ready to dive into the process to be able to hit the ground running. The lovely thing about digital publishing is that you can always go back and update just about everything related to your digital book, including the ability to upload a new cover, new synopsis and related text, and even a brand-new version of your novel or story. So if you learn something later in this book, you can always go back and fix the ebooks you've already uploaded.
Because nothing digital is ever truly permanent. Which is mostly a blessing, but sometimes a curse. You can spend way too much time fiddling and tweaking and re-uploading stuff, over and over with. Trust me, I speak from experience!
So let’s start with the digital distributor that can help you get your ebooks out to a wide audience in a snap – Smashwords:
I’ll discuss more about digital distribution strategies later, too, but in a nutshell, I think if you get your novels up at Smashwords, and then Amazon’s Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) site and Nook’s Pub-It, at a minimum, you’ll be in a great place to reach lots of reader. I’ll cover KDP and Pub-It in my next 2 topics.
A Brief Overview of Smashwords:
You can sell ebooks through the Smashwords site, but the first really great thing about Smashwords is that they distribute your ebook to over half a dozen sites, including the following websites:
- Barnes & Noble
- Amazon
- Sony
- Kobo
- Apple’s iBookStore
- Diesel
- Scrollmotion
So after your get your book formatted and uploaded to Smashwords (and assuming it passes their validation process), in a few weeks you’ll get your books “shipped” to the other websites listed above. At no charge!
The second cool thing about Smashwords is that they can do a lot of your formatting for you. Remember, there are at least a dozen different ebook formats, and some are specific to your type of ereader (such as your Kindle or Nook or Sony Reader). Keeping up with all those versions and platforms can quickly become a nightmare.
Smashwords uses a system affectionately called the Meatgrinder that takes your Microsoft Word document after you upload it, chews it up, and spits it out into the following formats:
- ePub (.epub format, used by the Nook, the iPad, Sony Reader, Kobo, and more)
- Kindle (.mobi)
- PDF (a popular format for reading on your computer)
- HTML (for reading in a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox)
- JavaScript (also for reading in a browser)
- RTF (“rich text” format, good for reading in Word or other word processing programs)
- LRF (for older Sony Readers)
- Palm Doc (PDB)
- Plain Text (just text, no formatting, very basic)
NOTE: I’m focusing on prose novels and stories in this series — mostly text. If you’re doing a comic, an illustrated book, or an art book, see the Formatting ebook I created with Niki Smith:
http://niki-smith.com/InMapsAndLegends/2011/03/28/formatting-comics-ebook/
And Smashwords offers a very writer-friendly royalty rate of approximate 60 to 70% per ebook.
Steps for Formatting for Smashwords
You can (and should) use the Smashwords Style Guide to get your Word doc into shape for the Smashwords Meatgrinder, but that document is huge, and a bit overwhelming:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52
So look over that doc, and then jump back here for my quick and dirty checklist version.
Formatting your Word document for Smashwords:
1) Copy the Word file containing your novel or story to a new location on your computer. Don’t use your original file (just in case you blow something up!).
2) Open your Word file and click the Show/Hide button: ¶. This feature allows you to see where your line breaks are, and other formatting symbols.
3) Make sure the AutoCorrect options are off. This will keep Word from automatically changing text and characters against your will. In Word, press F1 to launch the Help and type “AutoCorrect” to find how to turn this feature off.
4) Delete any headers and footers in the Word doc.
5) Also, delete any forced page breaks you may have entered into your document. Instead, insert three blank lines (press Return three times) to achieve some white space in the ebook.
6) Set the Style of all text to Normal. Click the Normal style and select Modify to change it to the following:
- 12 point Times New Roman
- Justified text (don’t use ragged-right, which looks a bit sloppy on an ereader)
- 1.0 spacing
7) Find and delete any tabs by searching for ^t and deleting the symbols. You don’t want to have any tabs in the document for Smashwords, as it messes up the spacing.
8) Add scene breaks in the middle of a chapter. You can add three blank lines or add centered * * * * * to show a scene break.
9) Press Ctrl+A and set the paragraph indents to .5" for the whole document.
10) Now you’ll have to go through your book and center all chapter titles and scene breaks if you used * * * * *. You’ll also want to remove the .5" indent for the chapter titles and scene breaks.
11) Change all underlined words to italics. Here’s a quick shortcut:
- Press Ctrl+F and click the Replace tab.
- For the first text box, press Ctrl+U for underline.
- For the second text box, press Ctrl+U twice, and then press Ctrl+I for italics.
- Make sure there isn’t any text in either box, and then click Replace All.
12) Instead of using two hyphens for an em-dash, change them to a real em-dash: “—”
13) Update any symbol text so you are actually using the real symbol, such as ©, ®, and ™ and … (for ellipses).
14) If you have a lot of bulleted lists or numbered lists, you'd be better off numbering them yourself instead of using Word's Bullets or Numbering option. The formatting for the Word bullets and numbers gets really out of whack with Smashwords, as well as with the Kindle.
15) At the start of the Word file, paste the required Smashwords front matter. This includes title, copyright date, and a couple short paragraphs required by Smashwords, which is covered in the Smashwords Style Guide. I have a “boilerplate” Smashwords file where I can copy this info from, as well as the back matter material (see next step).
16) At the end of the Word file, after your novel or story, paste any back page matter, such as an About the Author page, and excerpts from 1-2 of your other ebooks.
17) If your ebook is a short story, or a book without chapters, you’ll need to add a short Table of Contents after the copyright page. For more info, see Step 20 of the Smashwords Style Guide.
18) Save your Word file. It’s now formatted for Smashwords!
Uploading to Smashwords
After you’ve gotten your Word doc all formatted, it’s almost time to upload it to Smashwords. Before you upload, though, you’ll need a cover and some brief descriptive text about your ebook. You may want to do a quick look around at Smashwords and see how other writers do their covers and descriptions.
Or take a look at My Smashwords page to for some ideas:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/michaeljasper
To upload your formatted Word doc to Smashwords:
1)
If you haven’t done so already, register at Smashwords:
http://www.smashwords.com/signup
2) After you’re logged in at Smashwords, click the Publish tab.
3) Add your ebook’s Title, and a Short and Long Description.
4) Add your cover as a .jpg or .png file, with a file size no bigger than 20 MB.
5) Add your Word file.
6) Click Publish.
Depending on how busy the Smashwords servers are at the time you clicked Publish, your book may take anywhere from 5 minutes to a day or 2 to convert. You can click away from that page and come back later to your Dashboard to check your status.
Final Steps
1) Go to the ISBN Manager for Smashwords to add a free ISBN to your book. This ISBN covers the digital version of this book (not print or audio versions). I use this ISBN for all versions of my ebooks. This ISBN lists the publisher as Smashwords in the Bowker database, so if it’s important to you to have the publisher listed as you or your publishing company, you can buy your own ISBN, but they’re not cheap. Personally, I don’t think ISBNs are all that important in the digital world, so go ahead and use the free Smashwords ISBNs.
2) Go to the Distribution Channel Manager for Smashwords and select Opt Out for any digital distributors where you might want to upload and manage files yourself. If you’re just doing a short story, you may not want to opt out here, but I recommend uploading your own novel files to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. See the digital distribution topic for the reasoning behind those choices.
3) Let people know your ebook is available at Smashwords, with other websites coming soon!
And that’s it for Smashwords formatting, which is the most labor-intensive topic in this ebook (aren't you glad we got it out of the way early?).
Back to the Table of Contents
Formatting Your Novel (or Story) for the Kindle
You can’t talk about making digital books without the Kindle coming up in the conversation. When the first Kindle came out a few years ago, it was obvious it was a game-changer.
Up until that point, ereaders were just a curiosity, and few people used them.