Some Seemingly Simple Tips for eBook Formatting

Formatting manuscripts for eBook ain’t no fun. But having struggled with transforming Tinna’s Promise into said format from .pdf, I did learn some valuable lessons, learned mostly by experience (and repeated fails) and also learned a great deal from Mark Coker’s style guide for Smashwords. How I write my manuscripts now is influenced by how I will have to format for eBook later. I try to keep up with the formatting needs now so I don’t have to wrestle with it down the road.

If you’re not the kind of person inclined to read the directions (as I am often too impatient to do so), I thought I’d share some basic instructions on how to do it quickly and simply.

I don’t know if all authors operate as I do, but I’ve been known to write blocks of a manuscript in new documents and then cut and paste the new text it, if I don’t have the original file on hand. I also have been known to email paragraphs I’ve written on the fly to myself right in the body of the email. To make things worse, when a book is edited by someone else on another computer in possibly another version of MS Word (or switching between word-processing software), and you add and subtract text from your main file, you’re very likely to end with a Frankenstein formatted manuscript and you won’t even know it. Word has all these various styles. Whatever the defaults are on whatever computers your manuscript has been whoring with, by the time you’ve cut and paste the last of your text in and added all your revisions, it’s likely your styles are all mixed up and there’s really no easy way of telling just by scrolling through it.

Unless you wrote the whole book in that one main document, and passed that same document back and forth to editors or proofreaders, your book is going to be a patchwork of invisible ugly that won’t raise its hideous head until you’ve published to eBook and downloaded the ePub. You’ll be happily proofreading on your reader when boom... your font sizes are all over the place and blocks of your manuscript don’t match the rest. It can be annoying. More so because when the document is open in Word, everything looks quite consistent. Smashwords’ ‘vetting’ process also alerts you as to what problems may remain with your formatting that is preventing it from being submitted for the Premium catalog—but it does not always detect some formatting issues that appear in your final ePub. I take this vetting process quite seriously because Smashwords converts your manuscript to a variety of eBook formats to suit a variety of eReaders, so if you can pare it all down to the simplest, elegant format, you’re good to go. So the intent is to make it work for all.

The first thing you should do is make it a uniform formatting ‘style’.

If you are worried about having too many formatting issues that might trip up the conversion process, my first tip is to take your text and drop it into Wordpad . That will reduce your whole manuscript to its simplest form without any fancy-schmancy formatting mumbo-jumbo added in by MSWord and whatever other editors you’ve been using and pasting from. However, do not paste into Notepad because that will also remove intended formatting; such as italics and even paragraph indents, making the whole manuscript one giant text block. When you paste it all back into a word document, it will probably paste as ‘normal’ style, formatting it in paragraph blocks again anyway. But if you have italics or other special formatting in your text, you’ll likely lose it if you use notepad. So stick with Wordpad.

The ‘nuclear option’ for formatting can often be accomplished with simply selecting all your text (ctrl-A) and clicking the ‘Normal’ style. Your paragraphs will be separated by a blank hard return, with no paragraph indent—much like this blog post. It’s the easiest way to go. You can justify the text as well and be done with it.


If you look for the yellow box, that's the option you want to choose.

However, if you want your text to look like it looks in the book, indents and all, you select all of it, and you click the next style over, ‘No Spacing’. Don’t be afraid, because it will look scary first off—no indents, just one continuous paragraph of text until the first hard-return.


Gah! WTH! Kill it with fire! Don't panic. We're not done yet.

BUT with all the text still selected, you want to grab the little indent arrow on the top ruler (it’s the top one of the two pointing at one another on the margin), and drag it out to where you want your indents to be. The paragraphs ought to fall right in place as they’re supposed to, and you won’t look so scary anymore!


Above the page there's the ruler. On that ruler are little grey arrow boxes. The top arrow
box determines your indent. Drag it out to where you think your indents ought to be.
I go with a quarter inch as a mean.

All you have to do is pick your preferred font (you can always stick with ‘default’) but in this case, I chose Garamond. Keep in mind, if you’re using some foo-foo-la-la font you found on Abstractfonts.com or something like that, your results could be questionable. Stick with the ones everyone has. Arial, Helvetica, Garamond, Times, etc). I also justified the text. I like it to look like the page of a book.


See? It's getting prettier.

Now... the next step is to check your text for formatting features that might interfere with the conversion process and make stupid things happen, like soft line breaks between paragraphs and sections that will vanish, and tabs that screw with your indents. Click on the little paragraph symbol (¶) on your 'home' tab (assuming you're using a recentish version of Word) and all your formatting symbols will pop into view. Once those are up, scroll through your text and look for messy things. There should be only the ¶ symbol separating lines and ends of paragraphs, nothing else!

Gt rid of ‘soft returns’ and use a hard return to replace them. That means replacing the little symbol shown below (arrow going down and then pivoting left) with the ¶. Just delete it, backspace and return; that ought to do it.



Delete those little arrowy bastards!



That also means you should watch for tab symbols, as shown below, the little arrow pointing right. Use your center function to center text, do not tab it out to the center of the page. Select your text while it’s up against the margin and click the center text button. Easy as pie.



See that tabby whore? Backspace it into oblivion! There should be NONE in your manuscript.

Once the manuscript is all cleaned up of that, you can move on to formatting your title page and your chapter headers.

The first thing is to create your title page. So at the beginning of the very first line of your manuscript, insert a page break and push your first chapter down. Use this new page to build your title page—keeping the page break right after the last word on your new page.


Type out your title page as needed. Note that the text is still indented.

Remember, your document is a uniform style now—and all indents are set to where you just put them. But when you want to center something on the page, you need to remove that indent on those specific lines so that it doesn’t put the ‘center’ off kilter.


Select the text on your title page only, and drag that little indent arrow back to the margin.

Select only the text you want to center or justify, and set the indent back to flush with the margin for just that selected text.


Oooh, ahhh... purdy.

Then center them and format them as needed. Smashwords’ vetting process does not like fonts over 18pts. Just a tip. On an eReader, the title on the title page doesn’t have to be more than that to stand out. You can bold or italicize things as well.  You can justify any text blocks on the title page, just to make it look neat (you can center it too, it’s entirely your call—it’s your book).

If you intend to add in a table of contents that’s hyperlinked, then here’s an easy way to do it.



I bolded the TOC words, and you can put whatever you like on each chapter line, of course.

Go to the next page and insert another page break, and type out your Table of Contents as you want it to be.

Then click down to your first chapter and add in your chapter header if it's not already there (be sure to fix the indent on that line and all chapter header lines (and any other sequence separators to follow, such as the ****s used to divide sections). This will insure all of them are truly centered.


Chapter 1 or whatever you want to title it.

 Once that’s done, click your cursor right after the last letter of your chapter header and go to Insert > Bookmark.

The window will pop up. You can only use text and underline, no symbols, you don’t have to put all that much in there, a simple 1 will suffice if you like to keep things simple.  Click 'add'.

Once that bookmark’s made, go back up to your table of contents and select the text you want to hyperlink to that bookmark. Then RIGHT click on your mouse and pick ‘Hyperlink’

On the hyperlink window, there’s a button that says ‘bookmark’. Click it baby.




'Bookmark' button is on the right margin of the little window, second button down. See it?

You’ll see your first bookmark there. Select, hit OK twice, and you have your first hyperlink. You repeat that process as you go along, making bookmarks for chapters in succession and connecting them to the text on your table of contents.




Select the first (or appropriate bookmark from the list and hit 'OK'.




Et voila. That's your first hyperlink. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Another tip, Smashwords converters (and other converters) are not fond of .rtf or .docx format. So when you save your newly formatted document, save it as a Word 97-2003 document, it will make your life simpler. That *ought* to do it. Some eBook publishing sites have their own license notes you need to add, so be sure you do that as well (as shown above on the title page).


Just for good measure, to avoid problems.

You can add in extra pages for dedications, other title listings, web information and more. Just don’t clutter up your intro pages too much, you can always add some addendum pages, and maybe some sneak-peek paragraphs of the upcoming sequel or your next novel.

Those are tips from moi. :)

E-book formatting is for the birds.

What have I been up to lately? Not much except struggling with the perils of e-book formatting. O... M... G... Seriously; what a nightmare. I have put Tinna’s Promise up on B&N’s NookBooks and Smashwords, I downloaded it to my nook and there are STILL formatting errors. The worst are the line-breaks problem.

I spent an entire weekend recently reformatting a pasted .pdf of the final manuscript for Tinna’s Promise. I had to go from the back of the book to the front, reintegrating every line of every single paragraph of the novel because the PDF paste had obviously kept each individual line’s hard break when I moved it to word.

Otherwise the
book would read like
this and it would
be oh so annoying.

Of course, had I used an iota of the intelligence that my daddy gave me, I would have thought to save my final manuscript that I sent the publisher into a folder somewhere where I could bloody find it. Then I would have had the original .rtf with all its soft line-breaks in all their glory. But I did not find it anywhere, and so I had to use the final version of the book in .pdf format as the framework for the ebook to insure I had all the right chapters and such.

Naturally, when re-formatting over 120,000 words of text, you’re bound to overlook a line break here and there (sometimes they hide), and you are also bound to accidentally delete spaces between words while doing it so you get the occasional mergedword. It’s really irritating. I also noticed that one book section had been merged into the paragraph of the prior section, making a hideous jump in the story in the same freaking paragraph. To discover this was really defeating. After I’d already re-uploaded it twice.

What I’m going to do this weekend is to try to re-read the damned book page by page on my e-reader, and follow along on my laptop, making changes as I go. I am *then* going to go and get my dog-eared, personal copy of Tinna’s Promise (with the old cover and cracked spine) and make sure that each paragraph matches the hard-copy version for the ebook.

When I do that, I will upload that ONE FINAL TIME to both PubIt! and to Smashwords. Of course that means it will take THREE more days for the modified copy to become available to buyers on PubIt, and put it back into Submission-Pending mode for the Smashwords general distribution catalog, which is another week.

Oh, and the really irritating part? Smashwords doesn’t let you overwrite your old, error-riddled versions, no. They keep every single freakin’ version you resubmit. Right now... I have FOUR versions; all in varying states of errorsville. It’s really embarrassing. They should take those down. Argh.

What I *should* have done was view my formatting and let the little dots and ¶ markers would help me track down the problems. But I didn’t use this wad of grey matter in my cranium I guess, and I just derp-de-derped my way through it while watching my DVRed shows from that week. Now I’m paying the price!

So I encourage you to yes, buy Tinna’s Promise in ebook format, it’s wicked affordable, I've put it up for 99¢ for a limited time(normally $4.00; it’s $6.00 on iUniverse) HOWEVER, perhaps you should wait for another week before you download it so you are sure to get the least buggy version. The latest version does however have the whole of Chapter 1 of Tinna’s Might previewed in it. Just so you know. ;)

Anyway, on the brighter side, look what my hubby gave me for an early Valentine’s Day present?



Squee! I’m sorry, I’m revealing the depth of my geekery here, but I am and have always been, since the late eighties, a track-ball kinda girl. Both my dad and I are (and were in his case) geeks that way. I’ve always had them, for a long time, until my last Logitech died after years of abuse. Now, instead of a normal computer, I have this tiny little netbook that I use to write with (in addition to obsessive internet browsing and Stumbleupon benders). I hate track-pads so I just turned it off and got a wireless mouse that had this thick jump-drive sized USB connector on it, and it was always sticking out the side of my little 9” screen netpad and annoying me.

I am cheap though, at least when it comes to spending money on myself, so I didn’t want to drop almost $60 on a trackball. So instead, I just complained incessantly to the ether (but always when my husband was within hearing range) that I wanted a trackball again—a wireless one, so I can just put it down anywhere I want, on my thigh, on the sofa, wherever, and that I want the thumb kind, not the one with the ball in the middle, and I wanted a Logitech with the itty bitty USB thingie (it’s teeny-like; Pez-size when plugged in) so there’s no thumb-sized protrusion poking out of the side of my little computer.

I must have whined enough, because hubby heard. I came home the night before last, and was doing something on my little baby computer, and started mumbling about hating my stupid wireless mouse and its behemoth USB connector, and he got up, went into the guest-room and then came out with an Amazon.com-blue-gift-wrapped package, which he hucked at me and said: “Fine... I’ll get you ANOTHER Valentine’s present... just take this already...” Yeah... Happy girl now. Silly things make me happy, I’m such a gadget whore—that’s from my dad’s genes, he was such a tinkery, geeky gadget guy too.

So at least now I have something smooth and comfy to help me through this formatting nightmare. Yay! Oh, and BTW.. I’m at *least* 50% through Tinna’s Reign. It’s turning out VERY dark... and there’s a scene in there that’s so dark, so raw, I’m almost afraid to keep it. It’s also very soon in the book; so it might be really jarring to some of the more sensitive readers. I dunno. ::groan:: I will keep writing, and then when I am ready to revise and proofread before editing, I’ll make my choice.

I revamped the http://www.mirandamayer.com/ website, by the way. NO MORE ADS! Yes, I finally sucked it up and bought hosting (told you, I’m cheap). I will add a bit more content soon... but at least there’s no more godaddy bar at the top. :)

Here is a picture of a passed out puppy. Just because.