Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Some E-Book Formatting Items You Don't Care About!

Formatting an e-book for publication, especially for premium distribution (e.g. Apple, B&N) requires a special, vanilla-type use of Microsoft Word, something I never really paid any attention to. I took a lot of time attending to this for the first book. It was new to me. You can't use tabs. You can't use odd or super large fonts. You can't hit the space bar to place your paragraph beginning. You can't hit the carriage return more than four times in a row. You can't number pages. Blah, blah.
But it's all good. It's because of the e-book readers. That's what they require. So, I thought I was all prepared when I started this book. I would just use the same format as my last book. Just delete the text and start with the new book. Yeah, right. I submitted it to Amazon on or about November 2 and the book's been up for a couple weeks now. However, I'm still having trouble with Smashwords. I discovered one little biddy tab and re-submitted. Error. I just went through the formatting again and discovered two paragraphs in Body text style hidden among the rest of Normal text style formatting. Yuck. So, I've fixed that and now resubmitted. It may be another two weeks before the book gets approved for premium distribution. Oh well.