A Thirsty Mind Book Design

Author, former bookstore owner and wine seller, and former archaeologist--multi-talented Pam Headrick shares with The Write Way Cafe some tips about book formatting.

Hey, HiDee and Lynn. Thanks so much for asking me to guest blog. Always happy to talk formatting and self-pubbing.

Why don’t I start with a bit of background on me because, well, you asked me to.  I seem to need to change professions about every 5 years or so.  After I pared down my Archaeology career (I have an MA in Anthropology/Archaeology and spent many years as an archaeological illustrator), I decided to open a bookstore. Makes sense? So I dove right in, took a course offered by the American Booksellers Association... yes, there’s a week-long course in How To Open A Bookstore. And if you’re thinking about doing that then you must take the course or you’re headed for a mighty fall. Anyway, I took it, exhausting but fun too as it was on Amelia Island!

Then after a few years, the financial crash and eBooks took me down, and I closed the bookstore. I got tired of customers coming into the shop, drinking my wine (yes, we were also a wine bar), and browsing the bookshelves, only to be told when they walked out the door, “Thanks, I found the one I wanted to buy on Amazon. Great wine though!”

Anyway, I languished for a year or so, then in early 2011 an author friend called me and said, “You know Microsoft Word, don’t you? Do you think you could format this book I have and turn it into an eBook?”

Well, having no clue, I said, “Sure, of course, piece of cake.” Then spent a solid month researching on-line how to actually format an eBook.

Since then, I’ve gotten better at it, the technology has changed and I’m more or less up-to-date. I’ve also added to my services formatting for print-on-demand, which I love because it’s so much more creative, so many fewer rules. And the company now offers a virtual assistant’s program. Many of my clients have been writing for years, have a ton of backlist books, but don’t want to learn the new technology of uploading an eBook to various platforms. They also hate social media, and promotions had always been left to their publishing house. Well, they are their publishing house now. So they use us to upload, promo, form social media groups, schedule events, all those things their publishers used to do.

This is what I do almost full time from my office in a 200 years old house on the far eastern coast of Maine. But in 2012 I decided... hey, it’s not enough... I bet I could be an author too. This time though I didn’t take classes, more’s the pity. I should have been as diligent in this career as in the archaeology one, the bookselling one, and the formatting one. But I have my debut novel up at Amazon, Stone Bay by Min Edwards (pen name), and have some nice reviews. Several other novels are in the hands of Developmental Editors and my critique partner, so hopefully in a few months I’ll be a multi-published author.

Now how about some formatting tips for today’s eReading devices, and there are lots of them. Most devices accept only ePub files, which is nice because the ePub format is very forgiving. If you can format a Word ‘doc’ then you can format an ePub. It’s nice if you know InDesign, an Adobe product that accepts a Word file and turns it into an ePub. But you can also use Word, then save your file into Webpage-filtered (an HTML file). With a few tweaks with Notebook or another text editor, you’ll have something you can take to Calibre, a free ePub formatting program. Well, it’s not really for that. It’s actually a library management system, something you can organize your books with. But most formatters use it to upload an HTML file and then output an ePub file. The drawback is it makes the final output a bit complicated... and it’s not in fact the final output. You have to tweak it more.

Using another free editor called Sigil, you tweak the epub, tagging sections with Semantic tags such as Title page, Table of Contents, Beginning of the text. If you don’t do this then the last step, converting to a Kindle file, won’t be able to find some of its parts.

Amazon has finally gotten on the bandwagon with ePubs and now allows you to (also a free app) open up Kindle Previewer, drop in your ePub that you tweaked in Sigil, and have Amazon convert it to a mobi/kindle file.

That’s how you do it, kind of. There is lots of tweaking and learning going on every day, though. And if you’re serious about being a formatter you must join MobileReads forum http://www.mobileread.com/. It’s filled with formatters solving each others’ problems. I know they’ve solved quite a few of mine.

One thing I would say is very important, is to learn HTML code. Even though you start off with Word or InDesign, HTML is still the basis of an eBook. Don’t be intimidated by it. If I can learn it, anyone can. You don’t need to know it well enough to program, but you will need to be able to recognize when something is wrong with your HTML file. Does every paragraph start off with a <p> and end with a </p> or a <h1></h1> etc... Can you tell when your Table of Contents is wonky...?

<p class=MsoNormal<a href=”#Start_Reading”>Chapter 1</a></p> This is what your TOC should say when reading in HTML mode, Chapter 1, the place where you want the reader to start their reading experience. Of course there are many variations on this, but it’s a start.

Word Styles are things on your Word Home Screen that you probably never look at. You use a default tab to insert the indent on each paragraph, don’t you? Don’t do it! EBooks hate tabs. Use your Normal Style to set indents please... or your Page Layout feature. Stay away from tabs! Also, and you probably never noticed this before, but when you look at Normal, Modify, Paragraph, Line, and Page Breaks, you’ll probably see a little box checked that says Widow and Orphan control. Please uncheck that! Another thing that eBooks abhore! Well, they don’t actually have set pages, so what good is corralling those widows and orphans?

Here’s where Styles become critical. If you don’t use them then you’ll want to put a gun to your head at the end of the day. These styles (Center, Normal, Scenechange, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Title, and anything else you want to use) control your content... transfer into your HTML document as Style Descriptions and tell the document exactly how this ‘book’ is supposed to appear on a reader’s device. You’ll want to stay away from blank lines (Enter)... Kindle (at least the older Kindles) deletes those blank lines which will really wreck your eBook. Epub lets you keep them, but because I don’t want to be formatting 100 different versions of one book... I always format for Kindle; ePub reads it just fine.

Sorry, I’m getting more in-depth than I think anyone wants. My clients stop me all the time with “TMI... I’m lost... You could be talking ancient Sumerian for all I know!”

Remember, though, that formatting is the last step in your self-pubbing process: First you have to polish that initial Draft manuscript, then send it off for some ‘Big Picture’ editing, then revisions, then off to your critique partner (who’s been reading your work all along, but now needs to read the final entire book), then have the book line-edited and/or proofed, then send out some ARCs for review, then back for the final proofing (not by you though... you’ve read it too many times already). Now you can format, put all those pretty flourishes in, set off those quotes nicely, think about the screen sizes on Smart Phones. You need to have in the back of your head at all times what this book will look like to someone reading it standing at a bus stop with a Smart Phone, sitting at the doctor’s office with a tablet, lying in bed at night with a Kindle.

The gist of this blogpost is: To have a beautiful eBook you can’t just bang away on your keyboard. There was a design department at your publisher, wasn’t there? Well, they designed and you must, too. You have to study the process, and of course it changes all the time, but if you’re diligent, at the end of the day when you upload that file to KDP/Amazon (that’s Amazon’s publishing platform) then your readers will be happy. And if they’re not, they’ll let you know! This is the instant digital world.

Now on my own blog at http://athirstyblog.com I just give out tips or explain changes in technology. Sometimes I rant and rave about something, usually related to Amazon. I haven't started blogging yet in my Author persona.

About the author:  Pam Headrick writes as Min Edwards. 

http://www.minedwards.com/

http://www.minedwards.com/minblog

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorMinEdwards

https://twitter.com/MEdwardsAuthor

http://bit.ly/1gXiJlK - Goodreads

http://www.pinterest.com/minedwards - Pinterest

Stone Bay Romance

Stone Bay - amzn.to/1eL74Fq

High Tide Suspense - coming soon

Stone Bay Romantic Suspense

Stone Cold

Stone Heart

Precious Stone

Stone Fall

Talon, Inc. Suspense - coming soon

Romantic Suspense with an Archaeology theme

Triton Bay

Why I Chose to Not Self-Publish (for now) with Becky Lower

Publisher or Self-Pub. Learn today what author Becky Lower has to say on the subject.


It’s the wild west in the publishing world these days. With the legitimization of self-publishing by the Romance Writers of America (acceptance of self-pubbed books in the RITA, many conference sessions on the nuts and bolts of how to go about it), more authors than ever are jumping on the bandwagon, resulting in thousands of new titles being released monthly.

I say hurray to those brave souls who are navigating being their own publisher. And, someday I may join you. But, for right now, I’m content to be with my small press, even with smaller royalties. Why, you ask, would I turn my back on larger royalties? Here are my reasons:

1.  Time. As a debut author, I knew I’d be spending a lot of time building my brand and my backlist. I’m slow to learn new things on the computer, so I had to decide whether I wanted to learn the nuts and bolts of publishing my own book or if I wanted to establish a presence.

2. Money. If you’re going to self-publish the right way, you have to outlay some cash up front. To pay for editing, cover art, formatting, ISBNs, copyrights, the going rate for any self-pubbed book is $2,000-$5,000. And that’s just to get it out the door. Promotion is a completely separate cost. And I have less money than I do time.

3.  Validation. Call me crazy, but the self-doubting author in me wanted a legitimate publisher to tell me my books were worthy of their time. My books don’t fit into a traditional line, since I choose to write my historic romances about America in the 1850s and 1860s, and my contemporaries always feature women over 40. I was rejected by the Big Six because, although they were good stories, they didn’t know what to do with them. Small presses are more flexible. They just want good stories.

4.  Editing. This one is big for me. I’d never been through the editing process before, and didn’t know a good editor from a lousy one. How could I possibly have sifted through all the editing services out there today if I didn’t know what I was looking for? Now that I’ve been through the process a number of times, I can spot good editing from the first page.

5.  Cover art. Another biggie for me. Having been through this now seven times, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted for the cover of my latest historic. It was the first time I had a clear vision of what was to be on the cover. My publisher gave me their reasons why I shouldn’t go down that road, and gave me several choices, none of which made me happy. They finally gave me two choices—one as I pictured it in my head and the other a lovely young woman. They were right. My version sucked. But, if I’d been doing it on my own, I’d have gone with the cover from my head.

6.  Help with promotion. Since my funds are limited, I can’t afford a big ad budget and get my books in Bookbub, The Romance Reviews, RWR or any of the hundreds of other places where a presence wouldn’t hurt. Nor can I get Amazon to publicize a Kindle Daily Deal on my own. Sure, as a self-pubbed author, you can play with the pricing, but can you get the word out to everyone on Amazon’s list when you drop your price to 99 cents for the day? I still do a lot of promotion on my own, such as setting up blog tours, keeping my own blog up to date, being a contributing editor on a number of national sites, but the assistance I receive from my publisher is vital to my success.

7.  Distribution. Want to hold your book in your hot little hand? That’s a whole different ball of wax with self-pubbing. It’s one thing to throw it up on ebook sites, quite another to have it in print. A good publishing house will be able to sell your books directly from their site, as well as on all the ebook sites. And they’ll offer print versions within six months of publishing the ebook version. They’ll arrange for distribution to brick and mortar stores, and make them available to the sites bookstore owners and libraries use to purchase their books. If you’re a self-pubber, that means you’re also your own distribution source.

8.  Fellowship. Last, and probably most important is the friendship with other authors. Becoming a success in this business means forming circles of fellow authors, through publishing houses, through local chapters, through a social media presence, and at national conferences. They can help you with promotion, aid you in picking one cover over another, assist with proofreading and writing those tricky cover blurbs. And, most important, they can write a review for you and help spread the word to their friends. The heads of the publishing houses know people in the industry that I don’t, and help spread the word if they enjoy a book.

Writing may be a solitary profession, but it takes a village to get a manuscript to print and then into the hands of the public. I’m grateful I have the help as I attempt to get my foothold in this business and keep writing, so I can have a decent backlist. The one argument I keep hearing over and over from self-pubbed authors is that they’re control freaks and need to be involved every step of the way. Well, when you submit a book to a publisher, it doesn’t just automatically go from manuscript to print while you sit on the sidelines. There are multiple editing steps to get through, reviews to garner, covers to approve. If the publishing house is a good one, you have a locked-in release date and can begin to promote it on your own months in advance.  I still can control the outcome, and to some degree, the success of my books, by leaning on the publishing house to assist me in my efforts.

That’s not to say that I will never take the plunge into the world of self-pubbing. I enjoy writing a series, which do well in self-pubbed land. But right now, I’m picking my battles and trying to keep my head above water.

In 1858 New York City, Halwyn Fitzpatrick thinks he's off the hook for attendance at the annual Cotillion Ball. He has no sister to shepherd down the grand staircase this year and no real desire to go through the rituals of courtship and betrothal himself. Besides, he'll know the right girl when he sees her, especially now that he has new spectacles. But his mother has other plans for him. At 27 years of age, her son is in dire need of a wife.

Grace Wagner needs a husband by July, in order to inherit the trust her father has left for her. Her stepfather, though, has plans for the money that don’t include Grace, and the last thing he wants is for her to find a husband before she turns 21, thereby fulfilling the terms of the trust. She's been in love with Halwyn since she was thirteen, but he hasn't noticed her at any of the balls they've attended over the years. With the aid of his new eyeglasses, he spies Grace from across the room and they share a dance. Grace decides to present him with a business proposition that will satisfy them both. But, can a clueless knight in shining armor and a desperate damsel in distress find a way to turn a marriage of convenience into something more?

Avalailable at Amazon. 

About Becky:
Becky Lower has traveled the country looking for great settings for her novels. She loves to write about two people finding each other and falling in love, amid the backdrop of a great setting, be it on a covered wagon headed west in the 1850s or in present day middle America. Historical and contemporary romances are her specialty. Becky is a PAN member of RWA and is a regular contributor to USA Today’s Happy Ever After column. She has a degree in English and Journalism from Bowling Green State University, and lives in an eclectic college town in Ohio with her puppy-mill rescue dog, Mary. She loves to hear from her readers at beckylowerauthor@gmail.com. Visit her website at www.beckylowerauthor.com