So, content complete, its time to try and make this as readable and professional as possible, and as I’ve leant from the previous books, its a little more complicated than you might think. One of the reasons for this is the capability I want for sending out advance ebook copies to reviewers, something not possible on the Amazon KDP platform. I use some free software called Calibre to start this process. Let’s start at the beginning.
As I write the manuscript, I do so in a basic A4 Word document, unjustified, and using Styles rather than traditional formatting for the text. I’m a relative newcomer to Styles in the last year, but when converting to e-book and pdf, it is so much easier to use this approach rather than changing font and alignment manually, not least as the peculiarities of Word mean that any size or convert changes can result in bizarre layouts. If you follow the link you’ll have it explained, but basically what it means is that for each type of different format (larger font for titles, in my case different font for text messages, an easily changeable overall ‘look’) you create or modify a named ‘Style’, and apply it to the relevant parts of the text (maybe different for title info, acknowledgements) but if you need to amend for whatever reason, you can just alter the Style itself, rather than needing to manually go to every page in the manuscript. It’s a life saver.
So why do I need different versions? Well, first off, whether converted myself or via KDP, the e-book version needs to be unjustified, as e-book readers can change font size to suit the reader, so the defined justification doesn’t work. So I want a ‘raw’ completed version which I’ll save, where I’m happy with the basic layout and format, and I can test the contents format (references, table of contents) to automatically create my table of contents (which it does based on the Heading styles), but I need to be aware I’ll need different versions of these (hyperlinks rather than page numbers of my calibre e-books, and different pages numbers for the A4 and paperback size versions). Yup, there’s more to consider than you might think. I will end up with six ‘master’ versions of my finished book, all based on this ‘raw’ file, so having this as complete as possible means that if disaster strikes, and I need to make any changes, I have a file which can be converted to all of the six ‘masters’ without needing manual changes to each one. And what are the six?
Perversely, four of them are for reviewers (I use a similar process at the earlier Beta Reader stage too), only two for publication. So to maximise the convenience for reviewers (or Beta Readers) I want to be able to offer my book in Word, PDF, .mobi or .epub (the most popular e-book formats). What I’m going to do in these blog posts is show you 1) Some basic tips and tricks I find helpful for the general layout (and hidden codes) 2) How I convert to e-book formats myself using Calibre and the pdf for Amazon KDP 3) The trickier layout for formatting for pb, using gutters, mirror margins etc and 4) the cover creator tool or making your own.
My biggest tip for now is while you might want to experiment with all these, make sure you are happy with your final text first or you’ll curse like I did last time. It’s natural to want to rush at this stage, so close, but taking your time and triple checking everything before you start… trust me… you want to. The next post one will have some meaty tips for actual formatting in Word…
Stay safe,
Kit