A word document is not a book. A word document is a file that contains a book. Most authors don’t expect the difference to be important, but it will be, about 10 minutes after you post your word document and see what your book will look like from an online retailer.
Paragraphs don’t indent, they start mid-sentence, and chromosomally linked chapters have random bits of text that are apparently aligned, but are really just a mess.
This guide will show you what you really need to know to make a digital book from your manuscript.
Reflowable Text Changes Everything
With print book layout, you pick a page size and then place your text within it. Once you do that, the layout is set. Ebook Formatting works differently. Readers can modify many elements in your ebook, including font size and type, line spacing, margin size, and can even change between portrait and landscape mode. Your ebook needs to be designed to be legible in all these situations.
This requires a complete shift from word processing. Manual page breaks, tab indents, extra line spacing, and text boxes will not be recognized in a reflowable format and will be replaced by CSS and HTML markup that define the book’s structure rather than position.
Reflowable text implies that the first paragraph indent will be applied to all body paragraphs. Division of chapters is represented by a heading element with a page break to represent the distinction. This sounds rather academic until you see the same file rendered on a phone with text size set to 200% and it still holds together.
What’s Inside an EPUB
An EPUB is made up of a collection of files packaged together consisting of XHTML files, a stylesheet, an OPF manifest, and either an NCX or a nav document. The nav document allows for the EPUB to have internal navigation.
There are parts of the EPUB that dictate its functions and are invisible to the end user. The metadata fields can contain the book’s title and author. The language field and identifier field are used when the book is cataloged. A malformed identifier will not allow a EPUB to be submitted. Image files in a EPUB should be compressed. Embedding a 12MB image in a EPUB increases the file size of that EPUB, and some distribution platforms charge per file size.
There are also validations that EPUBs should go through. EPUBCheck is a program that finds mistakes in EPUB files that are not evident in preview applications. Examples of these mistakes may be unclosed tags, broken links, and references to files that are no longer there.
Where Professional Help is Worth the Investment
Some authors have formatted their books themselves, and some have even had success doing so. However, there are limitations to this method. Book formation tools can probably assist you in laying out a novel with chapter divisions and no images.
Book formation tools can assist you in including elements such as footnotes and endnotes, tables, figures, and poetry in your book; however, sidebars and recipes, for example, will probably still be a challenge to include.
There are Book Formatting Experts who have previously dealt with the issues you have with book structure. Their experience is extremely valuable because there is little to no documentation on how different retailers’ eBook platforms behave.
Evaluating Providers
Most Book Formatting Services offer packages that sound similar, so the important questions to ask are practical ones.
Will they let you keep the source files? If you keep the source files, you can make changes to the book without going through their process again. Find out how many revisions you can make for the price and what kind of changes would result in an additional charge. Also, make sure they can do the formatting for the platforms you will be using, because formatting for wide distribution is not the same as formatting for Amazon.
As a courtesy, ask the formatting service to provide a sample of a formatted chapter from your manuscript. Most will oblige.
Reformatting your ebook to include Alt Text and Language declarations can be done by the best Ebook Formatting Services, and it’s worth doing now since it will be required in more markets in the future, and it will cost more to add them later.
Before You Publish
Test your file on at least three different devices or apps. Change the font size and check that nothing collapses. Click every internal link in the table of contents. Read the first and last page of each chapter, where formatting errors cluster.
Reliable Book Formatting Services for Authors will do this testing and show you the results. If a formatting service provides you a file that they have not tested, ask them to do the testing.
The formatting process is very short in comparison to the writing process. It is also the only process that the reader sees before they decide to continue reading.