June Indie Ebook Formatting Award

Drum roll, please… Announcing, the very first Indie Ebook Formatting Award!

Indie writers, your ebooks are real books. You’ve poured your heart into the writing. You’ve given it the best cover treatment you can.

What about the formatting?

It’s time to find out who’s the best of the best (at least until next month. ). Maybe this will do for indie ebook formatting what Joel Friedlander’s (The Book Designer) monthly e-Book Cover Design Awards does for indie covers.

Because there is only one of me, I have to put some limits on it. Depending on how this goes, I might be able to open this up more in the future.

THE RULES

• Kindle ebooks, only. Entries must be submitted as either MOBI or prc files.
• Only one entry per writer.
• The ebook must be currently offered for sale on Amazon.
• The entry must be submitted by the writer. (or in the case of multi-author anthologies, by the editor) The ebook does NOT have to be formatted by the writer.
• The contest is limited to the first 25 entries (I have to figure out how much time it will take to properly judge this contest, so this rule is subject to change. I will post a notice that submissions are closed if and when I receive 25 entries)
• Deadline for entries is June 20th, 2013, OR until 25 entries are received, whichever comes first.

How will I judge? Four areas based on the same criteria I use to judge the quality of my own ebooks.

1. Technical. Does it work? Each entry will be loaded on three Kindles: A Fire tablet, a Paperwhite and a Keyboard. They’ll be run through their paces.
2. Navigation. I’ll test the internal navigation guides and the producer-generated external navigation guides. This includes internal and external hyperlinks.
3. Professionalism. Proper use of printer punctuation, layout, structure and attention to detail.
4. Style and Design. While the above are objective criteria, this is entirely subjective. I’ll be looking for “reader-pleasing” design and innovation.

What does the winner receive? Bragging rights for the formatter, of course. That’s a prize above pearls. The winner will be able to display the award badge on their blog or website. Let the world know YOUR ebook is beautifully formatted.

So what do you think? Proud of your ebook format? Think it’s a winner? Submit your MOBI or prc file and I’ll be the judge.

To Enter the June Indie Ebook Format Award:

• Send an email to: formatcontest@gmail.com
• Put June Ebook Formatting Award in the subject line
• Include a link to your ebook on Amazon
• Include the name of the formatter (that’s you, if you did it yourself)
• Tell me what program(s) were used to format and convert your ebook
• Attach a copy of your ebook file in either MOBI or prc format

An Admonition for Self-Publishers. Ahem…

I’m reading a self-pubbed novel purely for enjoyment (majority of my reading these days is because of work). I want to read it because it is my mostest, favoritest type of fiction, plus the writer is from a place I love to read about. I am motivated.

The writer is making it very hard.

1. The Kindle book is broken. It’s not a bad break. The user control for line spacing doesn’t work. Problem is (for me) I do most of my pleasure reading late at night. My eyes are tired. I need extra white space on the page.
2. The styling makes it look like a manuscript, which makes it ugly, which makes me pay even more attention to problem #3.
3. Lack of proper proofreading. Not that this book is the worst example I’ve seen, but combined with the manuscript-look, every error I stumble across irks me and takes me out of the story.

I will finish this novel. Unfortunately, for the writer, I doubt I will try another of his ebooks.

So, self-publishers, pay attention. This is VERY important. Your writing deserves respect. Start to finish. You write the best you can. You get the best editorial help you can manage. You package the product as best you can. Even if you are on a very tight budget and are doing most of the production work yourself, that’s still no excuse for sloppy work.

Priority: An ebook that works across devices.

If you are using Word to format your ebooks, download the Smashwords Style Guide by Mark Coker. It’s free. Pay close attention to the sections about using style sheets. The ebook you produce will be rather generic, with zero bells and whistles, but if you pay attention, start with a squeaky clean source file, and follow instructions, your ebook will work.

Word-users, print this out and hang it over your computer:

• NEVER USE TABS, FOR ANYTHING.
• DO NOT JUSTIFY TEXT.
• DO NOT USE ANY FONT OTHER THAN TIMES NEW ROMAN OR GARAMOND.
• DO NOT EVER USE MORE THAN THREE PARAGRAPH RETURNS IN A ROW.
• DO NOT FIDDLE WITH LEADING AND LINE HEIGHT IN THE BODY TEXT.
• DO NOT USE SPECIAL CHARACTERS WITHOUT TESTING THEM.

There are some long, involved reasons for that list. All you really need to know is that doing them will break your ebook.

When it is time to convert your ebook, do not save the document as an html file then convert it in Calibre. Please. Stop doing that. That takes all the junk Word piles on then piles on even more junk. Calibre is not the right tool. It will break your ebook.

Some tools that do work: Sigil, MobiPocket, and Kindle Previewer.

Sigil creates EPUB files. There is a learning curve, but the program is fairly intuitive and there is an excellent user guide to walk you through. Caution: Unless you have more than a passing acquaintance with html and css, do not use the EPUB files you make with Sigil to convert into MOBI files for Amazon. There are enough differences in styling that you risk creating a broken ebook.

Amazon will convert Word files when you upload a listing. If, however, you want to view and test your ebook live on a Kindle or other device before you upload, you will need MobiPocket and the Kindle Previewer, which converts your file using KindleGen. I highly recommend viewing and testing. When your Word file is finished, convert it into a prc file in MobiPocket. If there are bad errors, they’ll be caught and you can fix them. You can load the prc file onto your Kindle for live testing. Or you can run it through the KindlePreviewer to make a MOBI file. (Again, do not use Calibre. It’s fine if the ebook is just for you. If you intend to sell it, Calibre is the wrong tool.)

What if you do not have an ereader device? Online previewers are not to be trusted. Find a friend who has a Kindle or Nook and let them test the files. Ask them to toggle all the user controls on and off to see what happens. I do this for friends and friends do it for me (I don’t have a Nook or other EPUB reader). Better you or a friend catches boo-boos before a reader does.

Priority: Readability.

Avoid the “manuscript” look. The best you can hope for, appearance-wise, with a Word format is to basically make it look similar to a mass market paperback. Simple, spare, minimal ornamentation. Go take a look at your book shelves. Simple. Spare. Easy to read.

• Use printer’s punctuation and use it consistently.
• Manage the size of the paragraph indents (not too narrow, not too wide, avoid block paragraphs for fiction)
• Manage your chapter beginnings and scene breaks so readers don’t get confused by what can appear to be random line jumps.
• Let the machine do the work. Ereaders have user preference controls. Readers have preferences. Make it your goal to interfere with those as little as possible. Figure out how the devices work then format to take advantage of their best features.
• Proofread. Did I mention your ebook needs to be proofread. I did? Well, I’ll say it again, proofread the ebook. Your pre-production line-editing should have taken care of most of the typos and word choice mistakes, but trust me, no matter how well a work is line-edited, some errors in the text will remain. PLUS, occasionally errors are introduced in the formatting process. It happens. PLUS, hiccups occur in the format itself. If I had to make a choice between paying someone to format and paying someone to proofread, I’d pay the proofreader. It is that important.

If you’re bogged down by production and don’t know what to do next, email me. If I can’t answer your question, I’ll find someone who can. Help is out there. You have to ask. You have to be willing to work on it. If you need motivation, know that there are readers–like me!–who really, really want to read your stories, but will curse the day you were born if your laziness, sloppiness, or carelessness gets in the way of our reading pleasure.

 

 

 

Scene Breaks In Ebooks: Giving Readers A Clue

You fiction writers out there. I bet the majority of you love scene breaks. Dispense with boring transitional passages and maneuvering to shift seamlessly character points of view. Hit a paragraph return or two and start the new scene. I’m sure readers appreciate them, too, seeing as how they don’t have to slog through transitional passages and the writer’s effort to shift POV. (I know I appreciate them)

In printed media scene breaks rarely present a problem–even when the book design doesn’t have actual scene break indicators such as asterisks or graphics. A reader sees an inch of white space on the page and that’s the perfect clue that a shift has occurred. Print book designers can also manipulate the amount of text on a page and lessen the chances that a scene break occurs at the bottom of a page, losing the white space and its visual clue that a new scene has started.

Ebooks don’t work that way. (I’m talking about flowable text and not fixed layout) All too often white space looks like a mistake. There is no way to ensure that the break never occurs at the end of the “page.” If it looks like a mistake or if the scene change seems to happen without any clue, the reader is forced to pause to figure out what is going on. If those stutter-pauses build up it can wreck the reading experience and leave the writer with an unhappy reader who will not buy their next book.

Take a look at the following screen shot. Scene break or mistake?

Kind of hard to tell without a real visual clue, isn’t it? The simplest solution is to use a indicator to make it clear that This Is Not A Formatting Error:

No confusion there.

But, what if the writer doesn’t want scene break indicators? What if asterisks or graphics don’t fit the effect he is going for? A simple and effective method is to drop the first line indent.

There are all sorts of ways to indicate scene breaks. Me, being me, I like the fancy stuff. I often use graphics to add visual interest to the page.

I do a lot of reading on my Kindles and “text-fatigue” can be a problem. Kind of like driving through Kansas where it seems the landscape never changes.  “Oh look! More cornfields! Zzzzzzz…” I can only assume others feel the same way. Using a graphic mixes it up a bit, gives my eyes a slight change of scenery. It doesn’t take much.

The important thing to consider is that ebooks don’t offer the same visual clue opportunities as print books, so it’s up to you to come up with something so your readers stay in the story rather than in a state of confusion.

Happy New Year, Happy Day: Smashwords Now Accepts EPUB Files

It’s finally happened. Thank you, Mark Coker.

Smashwords Supports EPUB Uploads With Smashwords Direct

“One year ago in my 2011 annual year-in-review here at the Smashwords Blog, we committed to support direct EPUB uploads to the Smashwords platform in the second half of 2012.

Today we fulfilled that commitment with the launch of Smashwords Direct.

This new capability allows our authors and publishers to upload their own professionally formatted EPUB files for sale at the Smashwords store, and for distribution to the Smashwords retail distribution network….”

Read the rest at the Smashwords blog.

What does this mean? Why is this a happy day? A portent of wonderful things to come? At its heart, it means the most important thing:

Stable ebooks

I’ve spent the past year learning how to make stable ebooks. The biggest learning curve lay in figuring out how ebooks work. I’m handicapped because I’m NOT a computer savvy person. I’ve used computers for writing since the 1980s, but quite frankly I’ve used them as glorified typewriters and fancy bookkeeping ledgers with nary a thought about the inner workings or what was going on behind the scenes (behind the screen?). I had to learn a foreign language (html) and figure out who the smart people were so I could learn from them. It’s mostly been trial and error along with plenty of indulgence from some good friends who had enough faith in me to allow me to experiment on their books.

As much as I love the bells and whistles and trying this trick and figuring out that one, the most important lesson I’ve learned is this: If the ebook isn’t stable, none of the fancy stuff matters.

Is it possible for a Do-It-Yourselfer to make a stable ebook with Word? Or Scrivener? Possible, but not probable. Word processors are the wrong tools. You can follow all the directions and be meticulous, but speaking non-tech layperson to non-tech layperson: Shit happens.

A lot of that shit comes from the hardware side of the aisle. Every device maker is dreaming that his device is going to rise as Number One Preferred By Consumers Everywhere. Retailers like Amazon and Apple want their proprietary platforms to be the One Ring That Rules Them All.

With their Meatgrinder conversion program Smashwords struggled mightily to serve a lot of masters, all of them squabbling, and many not playing nice. The goal was to make it possible for anyone to self-publish and get wide distribution. The problem inherent with trying to satisfy everybody, though, is that compromises and narrowing parameters result in an overall lower quality. Ebooks had to be stripped down to the bare bones and great care had to be taken to lessen the chances that shit would happen.

It was backward and upside-down. Here we have increasingly sophisticated ereaders and tablets, full of possibilities that have barely been touched. The wrong tool (Word) makes it too dangerous to attempt exploiting the technology.

In order to reach greater heights, in order to really open up the possibilities, to look under the hood and see what these babies can really do, the ebook must be stable.

A validated EPUB file is stable. When the end user opens their ebook, no matter what the device, it will work. If the user wants to change the line spacing or the font or whatever else their device allows them to do, the ebook will oblige. It will look good on a small screen and it will look good on a big screen. If a user has multiple devices, the ebook will be stable across the devices. The ebook will continue to work even as devices are updated, improved and changed (as long as the devices continue to base them on EPUB–knocking wood here).

What does this mean for the Do-It-Yourselfer? I’m not going to lie. Building a validated EPUB file is NOT the easiest thing in the world. I have heard on good authority that the program called Sigil does a good job and is user-friendly. Having not used it myself, I do not know. Anyone who wants to discuss it, please, feel free.

By opening up Smashwords to EPUB files, my prediction for the New Year is that we’re going to start seeing a serious uptick in the overall quality of ebook formatting. Readers will demand it. They will grow increasingly dissatisfied with bland, generic looking ebooks and unhappy with ebooks that cannot be customized by their devices. We’ll start seeing innovation, too. Right now ebooks are a digital imitation of print. Face it, printed books are just about the perfect medium for conveying text. For that purpose, there’s not much room for improvement. What I’m thinking is how ebooks are different. That’s where the innovations will arise. With a stable platform, a solid foundation from which to build, ebook producers are free to innovate.

So thank you, Mark Coker and Smashwords. I predict your Smashwords Direct publishing option is going to result in benefits far above and beyond whatever it is you envisioned.

Should You Tell A Writer His Baby’s Ugly?

I’ve been a writer a lot longer than I’ve been an ebook producer. As a writer I have learned that the vast majority of writers do NOT take criticism well. “What do you think of my story?” is a dangerously loaded question. Enemies are made and grudges are born as the result of answering truthfully.

Ebooks are different. Granted, design choices are a matter of preference and taste. For instance, Andrew Vachss’s Strega. His publisher used an unusual device for the first lines in the chapters.

I don’t care for it. When I showed it to my husband and my son, they thought it looked slick and distinctive. It is a matter of taste.

Sometimes the formatting is actually messed up. Ebooks don’t render properly on various devices. I have several that look fine on my eink readers, but on the Fire the font “locks” in Helvetica and can’t be user-customized. Making a book that renders properly on every device is a big challenge and one I’ve faced (it’s what led me to learn html so I could make stable ebooks). It doesn’t make the ebook unreadable, but it has a definite effect on the reader experience.

Occasionally the formatting is so bad the ebook is unreadable.

That one I didn’t purchase. The description makes it sound interesting and the writer sounds interesting, but the formatting is so horrendous, I gave it a pass.

Sometimes the formatting is awful, but not so awful as to make the book unreadable. If the writer is good enough and the story is compelling enough, I can grit my teeth and ignore the layout.

This example looks like a manuscript. It has blank screens throughout. And the author used “typewriter” punctuation. I adored the story and the writing style, but still gritted my teeth. The few typos I encountered leapt off the page like crickets down the front of my shirt. I couldn’t ignore them.

Sometimes the formatting is just plain sloppy. The following example is from a publisher.

The publisher scanned print copy then didn’t bother to properly clean up the OCR rendering. It’s inexcusable, not to mention horribly disrespectful to the writers in this anthology and to the readers. It’s offensive. Unfortunately I see this kind of haphazard garbage in a lot of anthologies. The publisher takes the stories as is, makes no attempt at consistency in style or proper formatting, and slaps together a mess.

In other cases, the writer doesn’t know what he’s doing formatting-wise and uses Word to create the ebook file, ending up with something like this:

It’s not unreadable, but it’s ugly and looks unprofessional. If the quality of writing and story-telling are borderline, chances are it won’t be purchased in the first place or end up in the DNF pile because it’s too much of a chore to ignore how ugly it is.

There is a definite learning curve involved with formatting ebooks. The more I learn, the trickier it seems. I’m not formatting just one ebook every six months or so. I’m formatting several a week, gathering knowledge as I go, and when I run into problems, I’m motivated to figure out the whys and wherefores. My goal is to make ebooks that render well across any device, look professional and make a pleasurable reading experience. The goal of many Do-It-Yourselfers is just to make something cheaply and get published. I suspect some of them do not have ereaders and have no idea what their ebook actually looks like.

I screw up and make mistakes. Several times I’ve had people email me and point out the mistakes. Or comment on this blog to let me know where my techniques can lead to trouble or help me figure out problems or at least point me in the right direction. I’ve made some friends that way. Gained valuable resources. It doesn’t bother me at all. I welcome feedback. I welcome all tips and tricks and questions and comments and “What about if you tried…” suggestions. That’s because I’m committed (or should be committed).

Writers have made me gun shy about offering unsolicited criticisms. I have contacted a few writers to let them know their ebooks have problems. But carefully. With extreme caution. Those I have worked up the nerve to contact have been mostly receptive. Some have ignored me. Others have fixed the problems. Sometimes emails fly back and forth as we troubleshoot to figure out where things went wrong.

But for every writer I’ve contacted, there have been twenty I haven’t–even though I really, really wanted to. It’s the grudges and hatred thing. Which is kind of silly, no? I mean we’re not talking about opinion here. We’re not talking about tastes and preferences. Mistakes are mistakes. And some of those mistakes can seriously hurt the writer. Piss-poor formatting can kill sales. It can cause readers to demand a refund. It can affect every writer in a publisher’s catalog (there are several traditional publishers I will not buy ebooks from, no matter who the writer is, because I know the ebooks are poorly produced and not worth the price). It can affect future sales. I might suffer through one sorry looking book, but I’m not suffering through more of the same by the same writer/publisher.

So what do you think? What would you think or feel if some stranger came out of nowhere and said your ebook is ugly or unprofessional or unreadable? Would you be offended? Would you blow her off as a hater who dares to criticize? Would you be grateful? Would you attempt to fix the problem?

This inquiring mind really wants to know.

Boast Post: This Time It’s All About Me

What’s that old saying about the shoemaker’s kids? They go barefoot? Something like that. Yeah, it’s been something like that for me. A few months ago my former publisher reverted rights back to me for six of my books. I’ve been so busy doing projects for others, my personal projects kept being pushed onto the back burner.

To make it extra fun, all these books were written prior to 1995. I was able to recover two off disks. One I had as a relatively clean manuscript (as an experiment I ran the pages through my home scanner–take it from me, unless you have buns of steel to tolerate the hours you’ll spend in your chair, this is not the most fun method of file recovery). The others had to be scanned from the actual books. After all that scanning, they still have to be run through an OCR program and cleaned up.

I started with the easiest projects (ha ha), the two files I had on disk. They were final drafts, and required editing. With much help from Julia Barrett and Marina Bridges we managed to eliminate most of my writing quirks, beef up some weak plot points, and even trimmed it quite a bit. I hired the talented Jayne Smith to design the covers.

It’s a risk not putting people on the covers of romance novels, but I love the look and I’m willing to risk it. I also made sure to put “romantic suspense” on the cover so I could include it in the title to nudge the search engines a bit.

Need I say, I had fun with formatting.

Small caps!

I recently read a Ben Aaronovitch novel, Whispers Underground. Kudos to publisher, Del Rey, for releasing a very good ebook edition. They care and this reader appreciates it. At the beginnings of chapters they used small caps. It’s a small touch, but it looks classy.

That’s a screen shot from my Kindle keyboard. Notice the first line. There are many, many ways to start a chapter with a touch to offset the text. The simplest is to not indent the paragraph. Then there are drop caps, bolding, italicizing, or graphics to give it an “illuminated” look. I happen to like small caps.

The Kindle doesn’t actually support small caps. If you’re using html and use the font-variant, nothing happens. What I did was create a span class with small-caps as the variant, but then set the font-size at 80% (I’ll change that for EPUB, which I believe does support small-caps). I left the first letter on the line at normal size and reduced the size of the next few words which I had capitalized. I used a span class as opposed to a paragraph style in the hopes that I wouldn’t trigger the Amazon bug that shrinks the font in older Kindles. I had a friend test the book on his older Kindle, and no teeny tiny font. Yay, team!

The code for this particular sample looked like this:

What that did was make a paragraph with no ident, left the first letter normal sized and reduced the size of the next three words.

I also did something that opened a discussion with a friend. I placed the tables of contents in the backs of the books. He thinks they should go in the front of the book. I think that’s true in non-fiction where readers peruse the toc for information about what the book contains. In fiction it’s merely a navigation guide since in most cases it’s just a list of Chapter One, Chapter Two, etc. Also, if a novel has a large number of chapters then the potential buyer who downloads a sample could end up with pages of toc and very little story to sample.

So what do you all think? Table of contents in the front or in the back?

If you want to check out my latest formatting masterpiece the books are up on Amazon right now. (I’ll be uploading them to other places soon, but first I have some other jobs to do–you know, shoes…)

The Mirror Images series, Dark Reflections and Light Embraced are available on Amazon.

Little Things Mean A Lot–In Ebooks

Maybe you could come up with 1) a list of features which make ebooks look better, and 2) a seal of approval for books submitted to you which display a majority of those features.–ABE

That comment is from one of my lovely readers in an earlier post. She also suggested I run a feature similar to Joel Friedlander’s ebook cover design awards. (Have you seen the latest? Go check it out.) It’s tempting to emulate him (he’s one of my heroes), but he’s been designing books and covers for decades and he has the technical skills and hard experience to back up his comments. Me? I’m running on instinct. I know when I like something, I know when I dislike it, but not everybody shares my preferences. Plus, when I see a problem in an ebook, I don’t always know what caused the problem, so I have to go rooting around like a pig in a pecan grove, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And sometimes when I figure something out, I don’t have the language to explain what I’ve done.

Even so, I love it when people send me links to their work or send me screen shots to show off what they’ve done or tell me how they solved or worked around a specific problem. This is relatively new technology and the more we share with each other, the better all of us will get.

Back to the comment. What features make an ebook stand out for me? And by what standards do I judge the quality of formatting? I think I can answer that.

POLISHED

I’ve been reading manuscripts for over twenty years. I don’t mind reading manuscripts, but I don’t read them for pleasure. Manuscripts trigger my Inner Editor. Hence, I do not want ebooks that look like manuscripts.

• Use printer’s punctuation, NOT “keyboard” punctuation and format it in book style. Use proper ellipses and em dashes (NOT floating hyphens or en dashes–they look like mistakes!). Curly quotes instead of straight quotes. Foreign words with properly placed (as in use the actual characters) acute and grave accents.
• Do NOT underline text to indicate italics–italicize it.
• Double-spacing, extra spaces between paragraphs (in fiction), extra wide paragraph indents. All those make an ebook look like a manuscript.

TRANSITIONS

• If yours is a chapter book, clearly indicate the chapters. (I have read ebooks where I couldn’t tell where one chapter ended and another began–disconcerting, to say the least.)
• Use scene break indicators. In PRINT an extra line between scenes offers a useful visual clue. In an ebook, that blank space looks like a mistake. If the scene break occurs between “pages” it can be jarring to suddenly have a shift in time, place or characters without any visual clues to indicate the jump.

IDENTITY

This is a sticky one since many ereading devices don’t allow for headers (Like Larry the Kindle, alas, but I love it anyway.). Readers forget–this reader forgets–titles and author names. (I include the title of book at the beginnings of chapters, and sometimes the author’s name) It’s irksome when my only option is to click through the menu and go to the cover to remind me what I’m reading. Even more irksome is a lack of front matter and back matter. I read all the extraneous material. Extra points for ebooks with:

• An interesting title page.
• An interesting About the Author or reader letter page.
• Live links to buy more books.

NAVIGATION

Another sticky area since not every platform or conversion program is on the same page regarding generating tables of contents and using internal links. Still, extra points for producers who make the effort with:

• A useful Table of Contents

VISUAL INTEREST

The best feature of my Kindle, a dedicated ereader, is the distraction-free reading. The biggest downside is that it is distraction-free. Meaning, I sometimes grow fatigued by text and more text marching across the screen and nowhere to rest my eyes. It’s not that I’m bored with the story. I’m bored with the visuals. This is a tricky, sticky problem for ebook producers. You don’t want to jar readers out of a story with bells and whistles. Too much cleverness will detract rather than enhance. (And I swear, if fireworks, flickering images or screen glitter start showing up in my ebooks, I’m going back to print…) Small touches, small changes in routine can help maintain visual interest and reduce reading fatigue.

• Interesting chapter headers.
• Drop caps.
• Bolded text at the beginnings of chapters and/or scenes.
• Block paragraphs at the beginnings of chapters and/or scenes.
• Graphic touches–glyphs for scene break indicators or at the end of chapters or sections.

I think the quality that stands out in a terrifically produced ebook the most is the quality that is most difficult to define. It’s that sense that the writer/producer really cares about the book. That it matters to them and they want it to matter to me, the reader, as well. The care shows in the little touches and careful proofreading and attention paid to details.

I used to tease my older sister about her vanity. She wouldn’t walk out to fetch the newspaper unless her hair and makeup were perfect. One day she shut me down with: “It’s not vanity to let people know you care.”

That says it all to me.

 

 

 

Blog Revamp

First, an apology. I’m in the process of revamping this blog. I thought it would be easier to just make it private so nobody had to see it under construction. I did not know it would freak people out. I apologize. I won’t do that again. I promise.

As for the revamp–it’s not just the design and layout. I’m changing the entire focus. From here on out the whole blog will be devoted to ebooks. Design, production, nuts and bolts, the weird little details that fascinate me. I’ll share with you things I learn, useful tips and tricks and any resources I dig up. I’ll talk about formatting challenges, computer programs, distribution outlets and anything else I learn that might be useful for you (because you really do want to make beautiful ebooks, right?)

What I’ll stay away from is indie vs. traditional publishing, cover design (follow The Book Designer for the best advice on covers) marketing, promotion and reviews. There are other bloggers with far more practical experience and far better advice on those subjects than I can provide.

Even though people really like it when I rag and nag on traditional publishers–especially Harlequin–I’m going to leave that to others. Ditto for agents. Read Joe Konrath, David Gaughran and the Passive Voice for all the latest in tomfoolery and just plain foolishness happening in the industry.

As for talking about the stories, the books themselves, I’ll be moving my more popular blog posts about fiction over to my other blog: Jaye’s Love Affair With Genre Fiction.

As for writing and editing, I’ll leave that to others, too.

Again, apologies for any inconvenience.

In the Formatting Wars, How Writers Can Win

In my post earlier this week I talked about standardizing ebook formats. My friend, Jonathan Allen, did a pretty good job of explaining why there are so many platforms and proprietary formats for ereaders. Today he continued the explanation as to why it probably is going to take quite a while before we have ONE format and universal ereaders. Even though I now have a better understanding about how the situation turned into a mess and what it will take to untangle it, I don’t hold out much hope the situation is going to resolve itself anytime soon.

As a writer and ebook producer, this is not particularly heartening. I guess I hoped that if I turned my energies toward learning HTML, all my stress would magically disappear. Now I know that is not true. And it is stressful. I just finished a big project. (It turned out great, by the way, I am very proud of it–you can look at it here) The night before I had nightmares about the book being all messed up. After uploading it yesterday to Amazon, while it was in review, I tossed and turned and fretted all night that the book would be all messed up. Today I uploaded it to Smashwords and my stomach is clenched up with worry that I accidentally did something that will mess up the book.

All it takes is one little bit of wayward code that I can’t even see and weird crap could show up on some unsuspecting reader’s device.

Ay yi yi.

All is not lost. While the computer wizards are hashing it out, there is one thing we writers can do to make sure our ebooks don’t become casualties of the formatting wars.

Clean source files.

I bet 80% of the writers who read this post use a version of MS Word. As much as Word frustrates me because it’s so darned helpful, I love the way it produces documents. Therein lies the problem. To produce those gorgeous documents, Word uses a lot of codes, hidden and unhidden. In a printed document, it doesn’t matter how much junk is hidden in the file. Most printers have no beef with MS Word. In most cases, whatever you tell Word to print, it will gladly do so. Ebook files, however, are not documents. Much of that lovely formatting–tabs and extra paragraph returns and centering and font changes and special characters and headers and footers and page numbers and footnotes–will be interpreted by other programs as junk that needs to be fixed. Or some program, somewhere, might throw up its hands in despair and fill a screen with gobbledegook.

Writers who intend to publish their writing as ebooks–whether they do the formatting and conversions themselves, or hire someone else to do it–need to get out of the “document” mindset. What they need to start doing is thinking of the composition–the novel, short story, article, whatever–as a “source file.” Start thinking of formatting as a completely separate process. You compose a source file, then you use a copy of it to create a printed document, a pdf, an ebook or whatever else you require. There is no special formatting in a source file.

I repeat: THERE IS NO SPECIAL FORMATTING IN A SOURCE FILE.

The suggestions that follow are for Word users, but no matter what word processor you’re using, you can adapt to suit your needs.

1. No tabs. Ever. Never ever use the tab key in a source file. Not even one for good luck. No tabs!
2. No extra spaces. Not between sentences, not after paragraphs, not at the top of the page, not to indent a passage, not to set off text. No extra paragraph returns either.
3. No page breaks. But, but, Jaye, what about between chapters? No. Not even one.
4. No headers. No footers. No page numbers.
5. Turn off Auto-Correct and Auto-Format. You are safe with leaving on italics, bolding and underlining, but everything else, turn it off. Even curly quotes can cause a problem, so turn them off, too.
6. Use “typewriter” special characters. Two hyphens for an em dash. Three connected periods for an ellipses. (c), TM, (R) instead of the special symbols. Do not insert subscript and superscript characters. If you have words requiring umlauts, accents or whatever, keep track of them. They can be made right during formatting.
7. No bullets or ordered lists or outlines.
8. Set up a Source File style sheet. (I give instructions for how to set up style sheets in Word here) Make it simple, bare bones, with a font you like to work in. Use it religiously.

Source files are plain as milk and not particularly pretty. What they should be is clean. Make a copy of your source file to create a printed document with headers, footers, special characters, centering, specified page breaks, and whatever you desire. Make a copy of the source file to format your ebooks according to different platform requirements. If you outsource the work, include a set of instructions to the formatter as to how you want your book laid out, along with a list of special characters, symbols and any special formatting you desire.

That’s how we keep our heads during the format wars, Writers. Clean source files. Make those standard and we can endure the wait until the powers-that-be, whoever they are, get their act together and stop making things difficult for the rest of us.

 

Ebook Formatting Resources

There has been a lot of interest in my posts on ebook formatting. So rather than make people wade through the entire blog, I put all the links on one page. You can find it in the header under Ebook Formatting Resources or click here.

I’ve linked all my posts on the subject, plus added links to useful sites and resources for the DIY indie. I’ll continue to update the page as I learn new tricks or find useful new blogs and websites.