Every year there are thousands of manuscripts that have been written well but never seen by an audience. It is not the writing that is at fault. It is typically the case that the book has a self-published look with things like crooked margins, shifting chapter headings, and a cover that contradicts the book title. Potential readers will notice these things and more than likely will not provide any criticism. They will simply leave the book’s webpage.
Getting the book in the proper format is the last thing to do to the book after the writing has been completed and the book is ready to be sold.
What Formatting Actually Means
Book Formatting is the process of making your manuscript ready to sell in a specific market. When thinking about the print copies of your book, Formatting looks at the size of the trim, the gap between bound pages (gutter margins), and the way the text in the book is organized through running heads. When thinking about the digital copy of your book, Formatting looks at making the text flexible (reflowable), and ensuring the book’s navigation and headings are correctly formatted.
A format that is designed for print cannot be easily converted for a digital format. Floating images and a table of contents that do not work are just a few of the problems that arise when a format is converted from print to digital.
Why Cover Design is in the Same Realm
Doing Book Formatting and Cover Design as two separate projects will result in an added cost for the author. The cover of a book gives the potential reader an idea about the genre of the book as well as the tone. The formatting of the book either supports the cover or goes against it.
Consistency in typography is retained when the cover, title page, and body text are treated as a single unit. The spine is of correct width and proportion to the page count and paper stock. The thumbnail is still legible to shoppers, who on average see a thumbnail the size of a postage stamp.
It Is Important To Follow The Platform Requirements
Each platform has specific requirements and files that do not follow those requirements are either rejected or approved and then fail to display correctly.
Amazon Book Formatting Services would typically correct bleed for hard covers and paper backs, generate cover templates for the page count, and provide KPF/EPUB files validated against Kindle Previewer for each of the different display devices. Amazon’s rendering engine has peculiar behavior with respect to CSS and a perfectly formatted ebook can misbehave on a Paperwhite.
Barnes and Noble Book Formatting has a different set of rules for Book Formatting, and once again, cover dimensions and metadata do not align with Amazon, as well as disparate file types and quirky EPUB rendering. Publishing wide means preparing separate files rather than uploading one version everywhere and hoping.
Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play each add their own requirements. This is the practical argument for professional help: the work of maintaining current knowledge across five or six platforms is truly tedious.
The Best Ebook Formatting Services
Before you pay anyone, there are a few things to check.
Inquire about the files you will receive. You should receive the final files as well as the source files. This way you can make corrections with any vendor of your choice. Understand how their revision process works. You will find mistakes after the files are sent, and you should expect to pay to have them fixed. Provide examples of work they have done in your industry, as a cookbook and a thriller have very little in common structurally with an academic monograph.
Always inquire about validation. Anybody can make an EPUB file, but ensuring the file has proper markup and is accessible requires additional work.
Take quotes for a flat rate with a grain of salt. A textbook manuscript with 400 pages, 90 figures, and a lot of footnotes is a lot more difficult to format and convert to an EPUB file than a novel manuscript with a 60,000 word count. A vendor who gives a flat rate quote for your textbook conversion likely hasn’t evaluated the work involved.
A Reasonable Timeline
You should budget for a minimum of two weeks for the interior and cover work, and an additional week for each print proof you request. Even if the digital proof looks good, you should order one copy to see how the book will actually be bound. This is a good investment of your money, as the work you commission for your book is the first thing your readers will see. After all the work you have done writing your book, the formatting and cover work is a good investment.