Formatting an eBook isn’t hard. What you have to remember is the conversion process involved.
An eBook is read on a device such as a Kindle Fire, a Nook, an iPad, and more. Many of the devices have proprietary coding—Kindle is one, and it comes with a .mobi extension to the file.
Here is an excellent article that explains the varied eBook formats.
An eBook is a reflowable file. The text is fluid—not constrained to a specific page size like a print book is. This reflowable aspect to eBooks means you don’t create page headers or page numbers for your book. But it also comes with some definite requirements.
Specific formatting needs
Until I figured it out for myself, the most frustrating part of a digital file is how the conversion programs view stand-alone paragraph returns. They don’t! Well, maybe they do, but they ignore them. I’d have to ask a programmer. The end result is the same—no extra space.
Let’s examine the picture below.
Those little black backward Ps are paragraph returns. Many people will use them to put space between separate elements of their book such as chapter headings and body text. That’s exactly what I’ve done in the example above.
In the conversion process, those extra returns will not code and thus, your body text immediately follows the chapter heading.
Therefore, you must use styles. The picture below is the standard styles menu you’ll find in MS Word. These styles have special settings that create a certain font size and spacing before and after your text. Experiment with them. You can also create your own.
Many people also use extra returns to put the next chapter at the beginning of a page. While this may work with print books (but I don’t recommend doing it that way), it does not work with eBooks. The page break is required. If you don’t use a page break, your chapters will not begin on a new page in your eBook.
Conversion programs
There are a number of programs available for handling the conversion to eBook.
- Kindle Create, free from Amazon Kindle.
- Reedsy, requires an account, but as far as I can tell, it’s free.
- KindleGen, required if you use Scrivener to compile to MOBI.
- Calibre, the program I use.
- Draft2Digital, requires an account.
- Vellum, an excellent program, but for Mac only, currently $199 for unlimited eBook creation, or $249 for unlimited eBook and paperback creation. If you don’t own a Mac, there is a work around. The process for which you can Google.
You do not have to worry about trim sizes as you would in print design. Just open a new Word doc, set to single spacing, adjust your first line indent to what you want, and set it to no spacing before or after your paragraphs. Here are guidelines from Amazon KDP on how to format your book in MSWord.
You’ll probably find that formatting an eBook is way simpler and easier than formatting a book for print.
If you have a question I haven’t answered in today’s blog, just type it in the comments below.
This is very helpful as always, Debra. Thank you!
You’re welcome.
What would you do with images? How do you “anchor” them in Word?
If you Google search “anchor an image in Word,” you get plenty of results. I’d include the version of Word you’re using. I believe the KDP guidelines tell you how to handle your images.