I've been wrapping up production on an anthology and thought I'd share my formatting experience as well as get some pointers if I"m doing something wrong.
First, some advice:
Don't use Word. Word loads your manuscript with so much fluff and forced formatting templates, it'll make any conversion a possible hell. If you're going to use Word for your document, please find some online resources that walks you through the setup of your document. Amazon has a guideline available here.
I encourage everyone to get your hands on Scrivener. It has a great compiling feature that can do 75% of your ebook creation.
I encourage everyone to download Calibre. There download page is here.
I encourage everyone to take as much time learning how to format as you would with any aspect of the industry.
Scrivener (Windows Version) Formatting Setup
As stated above, Scrivener does much of the ebook formatting for you. Some things I had to do manually are:
Scrivener Compiling Options
There are many books you can download, or online guides for in depth Scriviner Compiling. The problem is that they are mostly targeted for the Mac version of Scrivener.
Calibre
Calibre is a digital library manager. It wasn't meant to publish eBooks, but does remarkedly well in polishing your file you compiled from other sources. Since Scrivener did most of the work, the two programs work hand-in-hand.
Just a little insight. Ebooks are specialized webpages. If you have a professional background in HTML/XML code, you probably know more about building ebooks than most formatters!
Calibre Easy Mode
Calibre "WHAT-AM-I-DOING" Mode
When you right-click on your ebook, you'll get another menu. The one we want is Edit Book.
There isn't a walkthrough for this. I pretty much analyzed what effects I desired, and which ones I didn't like. So, what are you looking at here?
On the left is your files. Notice they have an .xhtml suffix. Their webpages!
On the far right is your live previewer. Click on any file and you'll see what it would look like in an eReader.
In the middle is the actual coding, and about that is a set of tabs for each file you have open.
What I did:
First, some advice:
Don't use Word. Word loads your manuscript with so much fluff and forced formatting templates, it'll make any conversion a possible hell. If you're going to use Word for your document, please find some online resources that walks you through the setup of your document. Amazon has a guideline available here.
I encourage everyone to get your hands on Scrivener. It has a great compiling feature that can do 75% of your ebook creation.
I encourage everyone to download Calibre. There download page is here.
I encourage everyone to take as much time learning how to format as you would with any aspect of the industry.
Scrivener (Windows Version) Formatting Setup
As stated above, Scrivener does much of the ebook formatting for you. Some things I had to do manually are:
- Set your paragraph left indent to 0.30
- Set your paragraph right indent to 12.00
- Remove indent on first line of each chapter.
- Cap all the words in the start of each chapter. The number of words can be set from three to ten.
- Line spacing is set to "single" with before and after set to "0".
- I used the Calibri font, but most eReaders force your document to use any of the three or five they officially recognize.
- Use the "Show Invisibles" Option to catch and remove any errant spaces and paragraph breaks.
- Make sure you remove all "white space." I went through the manuscript four to five times checking for spaces after sentences, extra spaces between words, and extra line breaks. When I edited in Calibre, there were still a few. White spaces will do funny things to your ebook.
Scrivener Compiling Options
There are many books you can download, or online guides for in depth Scriviner Compiling. The problem is that they are mostly targeted for the Mac version of Scrivener.
- There are many formats Scrivener can compile to. I'm focused on the ePUB format.
- In the Content side menu, make sure to check the options for Pg (Page) Break Before if you want a normally grouped item separated from the previous document. This is important for front and back matter.
- Also in Content is the option to select what files you want included in the eBook. The option exists because Scrivener is meant for your one stop authoring needs. You can store character profiles, maps, plot notes, etc. Make sure you haven't included any of these files in your eBook.
- In the Separators right menu I set Text Separators to ***, Folder Separator to Page Break, Folder and (then) Text to "Empty Line" and Text and (then) Folder to "Page Break"
- Formatting right menu allows you to display certain types of data. I have all levels set showing "Text" and only the folder level showing "Titles."
- You can ignore everything else except for the Meta-Data menu option. Fill in the appropriate information such as author name, publishing date, description, etc.
- On the bottom, just above the dropdown menu for desired format type, is another dropdown box that allows you to enable and chose the front matter items you want to add. Front matter is the title page, copyright, dedications, forwards, etc. Don't worry about a Table of Content. When you seletected the files under the Content menu, you're telling Scrivener what items are supposed to be in the Toc. Scrivener will do the rest.
- Compile and save to an easy location
Calibre
Calibre is a digital library manager. It wasn't meant to publish eBooks, but does remarkedly well in polishing your file you compiled from other sources. Since Scrivener did most of the work, the two programs work hand-in-hand.
Just a little insight. Ebooks are specialized webpages. If you have a professional background in HTML/XML code, you probably know more about building ebooks than most formatters!
Calibre Easy Mode
- First, import our eBook into Calibre. You can find the option to do so in the top left conviently named Add Book.
- Next option is Edit Metadata. Click it and update/verify your metadata information you injected using the Scrivener Compiler.
- On the far right is the Edit ToC. Click on it to verify/update your ToC file.
- To the left of Edit ToC is the Polish Book feature. The only item you'll want to use is the Remove unused CSS rules from the book. This is an important feature. It shrinks your book size significantly. Mine went from 9 MB to just under 1 MB. This is important because Amazon has a size limit. Also, customers don't want their devices cluttered with bloated files. Besides, dead CSS code can do whonky things with your formatting.
Calibre "WHAT-AM-I-DOING" Mode
When you right-click on your ebook, you'll get another menu. The one we want is Edit Book.
There isn't a walkthrough for this. I pretty much analyzed what effects I desired, and which ones I didn't like. So, what are you looking at here?
On the left is your files. Notice they have an .xhtml suffix. Their webpages!
On the far right is your live previewer. Click on any file and you'll see what it would look like in an eReader.
In the middle is the actual coding, and about that is a set of tabs for each file you have open.
What I did:
- First, I clicked on the Contents.XHTML and made sure my ToC looked right. It didn't, so I tinkered with it.
- Second, I went to a chapter (shor story in my case), and analyzed the code. I didn't like the *** separators that Scrivener put between my chapter (story) title and the first page of that story. I clicked on the item I wanted to delete and noticed that cursor in the center window moved to a string of coding containing the separators. I justed deleted the line. It worked!
- I also noticed some centered items I had in the body of the story weren't centered with the story title. Since these items were always visible with the story title, the book looked crooked. I discovered the coding that centered the title and applied it to the content in the story.
- The center code viewing window highlights areas of possible concern. For some reason, legitamate spaces between words were flagged. Experimenting, I deleted the space, then inserted a new one. It worked. Why? Who cares! I'm just glad I removed something of possible concern.
- Be careful with the previous step. em dashes were similarly highlighted. I didn't want to touch them.
- I also inserted line breaks around the *** section separators to give it a cleaner look. The code for that is simply <p></p>
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