One of the challenges facing authors who choose to self-publish their books digitally is that of formatting the files. I thought we’d talk a bit about that today, in preparation for the upcoming discussion about taking books to Print on Demand editions.

Once upon a time, I was a typesetter, and later, I did desktop publishing. Both of these tasks involve arranging type into specific formats. I was used to choosing the font, the size, the justification and the spacing, all to ensure that the result was pleasing. What’s important to note about typesetting is that the process ensures that everyone sees exactly the same result.

Digital text is different. It flows. Websites designed in HTML flowed – originally all sites were HTML-based and many still are. The website designer could designate a family of fonts in the HTML code, and choose from an array of sizes (like Normal, Bigger and Smaller). The site could appear differently on every computer and with every browser, depending how the user had set up his or her preferences. (As you might imagine, this lack of control over the look of the finished site drove former typesetters like me bananas!)

Digital books follow this model, that of a text stream. On digital platforms – like eReaders – the individual looking at the text can make it bigger or smaller. They might be able to change the font. The point is that a digital book formatter doesn’t have as much control over the look of the book for every user as a typesetter does.

A couple of things fall out of this. One is that the first thing you need to do before creating different formats of your book is to create a clean text stream. This means that the file of your book has the content (of the book) with only a minimum of formatting. That ensures that the book looks as good as it can in as many formats as possible.

The best guide for this I’ve found is the Style Guide written by Mark Coker for Smashwords – and even better, it’s free. Go download it and follow all the steps. Open it and open your book manuscript file, and work through the entire process, one step at a time. This will probably take you a couple of hours – especially the first time – but will give you a nice, clean text file as a starting point. (I’m assuming that you’ve done all the copy editing, line editing, spell checking and grammar checking ahead of time.) Aim for a beautiful file, in Microsoft Word, and use it as the cornerstone of every additional format you generate.

Once you have your beautiful file, call it V1.0. Version control is really important with all digital files, both so that you know which version you’re opening and/or working with, and also so that remote servers know what you’re uploading. If you upload MyBook.doc then discover that there is a typo in the file, fix it but don’t change the name of the file, the server might not accept a new upload of MyBook.doc. Or if it does, it might mix them up. MyBook1.doc will keep everything clear for everyone.

It is true that you can hire someone to format your digital file, but I think it’s a good plan to do at least this much on your own. There may be some judgement calls to be made, and you’re the one best qualified to make them. Once you have your beautiful clean file, you can either format it yourself for different platforms, or hire someone to do that formatting for you. It’s not that hard, just requires patience and a bit of time, so you might want to learn to do it yourself.

For Kindle, Mac users can upload a Word file to the Kindle Digital Program. This actually creates an issue if you have short paragraphs (and sadly, I do). The utility at Amazon’s end that converts Word files to Kindle books gets confused by short paragraphs – it indents those lines as if they were an excerpt. The way to avoid this is to create an htm file and upload that. If you have graphics, you’ll have to zip the subsidiary files in their folder together with the htm file and upload that. If you don’t have graphics in your book file, you can click the box on the KDP book details page to have the cover you’ve uploaded for display inserted into the Kindle book.

For Smashwords, everyone can upload a Word file.

My Kindle and SW files are essentially identical. One says “Digital Edition” and one says “Smashwords Edition” on the copyright page. (Smashwords requires that detail.) My Smashwords files have the covers embedded into the files (Mark Coker’s book tells you how to do that) while my Amazon ones don’t. My Smashwords files are uploaded in Word; my Amazon files are uploaded in htm. Their respective conversion engines convert the book file to their formats.

You can also create a PDF edition from your Word file, by choosing Save as PDF from the Print menu. That format can be uploaded to All Romance eBooks. All Romance eBooks lets you offer a number of formats, so you will need a software utility to convert your book into those formats. Note that downloading the Smashwords EPUB, for example, and uploading it as the EPUB to ARe is a violation of the Smashwords Terms of Service. They created that file and have ownership of it. I use Calibre because it’s free. It likes htm files for importing, then lets you set a bunch of metadata before exporting the file to different formats. Those formats can then be uploaded to ARe and other online retailers. ARe says, btw, that its bestselling formats are PDF, EPUB and MOBI, and suggests that you offer those three as a minimum for any title available on their site.

If there’s going to be a print on demand edition of the book, I use my lovely clean Word file to create the interior of that book. More on POD next week!

Yup, tomorrow, I’m going to show you some knitting…