From TCK Publishing:
One of the factors that decides whether your book will be successful or a flop on Amazon Kindle is the formatting.
While reading a book, have you ever seen the text all run together, paragraphs with weird characters, or chunks of text that just seems to go on forever?
How did you feel about it?
You probably just ended up putting that book down.
You can have an astounding title, a spectacular cover design, and awe-inspiring content, but if you don’t format your book correctly, it will affect your readers’ overall experience.
Poor formatting makes it difficult to read your book. It also affects how your readers perceive the quality of your book. Readers have been unconsciously trained to read books designed in a particular format—and to expect that format every time. They pick up on the layout and arrangement more than they think. If the formatting of your book is not what they are used to, they may feel that it’s been cheaply made or done by an amateur.
Does this mean you have to hire a professional to format your book?
No.
I’ve seen a lot of authors spend hundreds of dollars just to have someone format their book. They think they don’t have the knowledge or skill to do it themselves.
I’ve formatted my ebooks myself and I’ve mastered the techniques to do it quickly and efficiently. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars just to get your book looking professional and well-formatted. I can teach you how it’s done. All you need is to study the steps and implement them with the next book you publish.
. . . .
One point that I want to make is that the series of steps that I’m going to show you offers a guide to formatting your manuscript. You can still choose to make changes to the basic template! You can change how big your title is going to be, customize the subtitle, alter chapter headings, and all that. You can also change the alignment to centered or justified.
However, there are some things that I think you don’t have to bother with.
An example is the font. If you have a special font that you want to use, that’s fine.
But truth is, the font doesn’t really matter because 99% of readers choose their own fonts on their device. They can make the font bigger, smaller, or fancier as they wish. To make this process quick, I just utilize the style set on MS Word and set it to “Simple.”
“Style set” basically tells MS Word what kind of fonts to use for your title, headings ,and paragraphs. I use “Simple” because it’s the easiest and most straightforward style.
To change the style set in your document, just click on Change Styles, scroll over to Style Set, and select the option Simple.
. . . .
End this section by inserting a page break. What this will do is ensure that your readers won’t see the next section or chapter of your book until they click on the Next button and scroll to the next page on their Kindle device. So, at the end of title page, every section, and every chapter, you’re going to insert a page break to make it nice and neat.
Click on the Insert tab and click on Page Break.
Link to the rest at TCK Publishing and thanks to Carl for the tip.
The OP doesn’t lend itself to further excerpts because it includes detailed instructions with screen grabs from Word illustrating each step.
PG has used Jutoh to format Mrs. PG’s books for a few years and been generally satisfied with the results. As with many things computer, once PG finds a solution that works for him, he doesn’t tend to continue his research into alternative solutions in that particular area. (In a better world, Alan Ashton and his students would still be running WordPerfect and PG would still be using it.)
However, PG thinks he would have noticed if a much better ebook formatting solution was discussed by indie authors during his wanderings around the net.
PG was intrigued by the approach in the OP because he always goes through Mrs. PG’s manuscripts using Word to clean up and standardize formatting, etc., prior to dumping the the results into Jutoh.
Since Mrs. PG is a writing genius, PG doesn’t want to interfere with her creative process by asking her to worry about formatting when she is communing with her muse.
On the other hand, PG’s muse was kicked out of the Muse Guild for bad behavior a long time ago, so PG is less concerned about his muse refusing to commune on command because PG’s muse can’t stomp off to inspire anyone else without the consent of the Guild. PG’s muse throws hissy fits and sulks a lot, but, in the end he always returns.
But enough of Muse gossip.
So the question for PG is whether expanding his tweaks to the Word file would be faster/easier/better than using Jutoh to prepare the file for uploading to Amazon. He likes Jutoh and knows how to use it to finish the formatting job, but is always interested in improvements to his current methods of operation.
Feel free to express opinions on Jutoh vs. Max Word in the comments.
I like Jutoh. I copy/paste from LibreOffice into it. I will have to try using the emphasis format because italics always get lost in c/p, which is annoying since I indicate telepathic communication with italics.
I LOATHE Apple. After the incredibly stupid dance they led me when trying to upload my books to iTunes through D2D (because I utterly, utterly refuse to allow a Mac anything into my home) I’m even less willing to use anything they created. I think Apple is incredibly conceited, arrogant and nasty, as well as way overpriced. (And Microsoft is not far behind. Will shift to Linux soon.) So while Vellum sounds awesome, I’ll wait for Hugh Howeys Neo and make do with Jutoh in the meantime.
Heh. From the looks of it, each has their own favorite method – and is not going to change. (Except possibly Alicia – for her, I found during my developer days that saving the Word doc as HTML, then using an HTML to PDF converter worked better. Not great, mind you, but better…).
Myself, I run a macro over the Word doc, which puts out an HTML file (that is multiple files for a novel length, admittedly, so is annoyingly repetitious), then a batch file to Kindlegen it all together. I will, at some point, take the time to automate that process further; the old adage about the cobbler’s children having no shoes applies there…
Being a paranoid, I do go through every bit of the finished product, on as many devices as I can, before letting Amazon have it. But I have not noticed a single problem that was not trackable back to an error in my original document.
I have never had a problem using Word. But I have used Word since the first release back in the 80s, frequently on technical documents with onerous and precise formatting requirements that make Kindle and CreateSpace requirements a walk in the park. Some time, just for fun, try to format a document that conforms to ANSI and OSI standards, is easy to update and revise, and can be quickly modified to meet changing format requirements when ANSI gets antsy. (I apologize.) Word has made this progressively easier over the years.
The trick is to develop habits that take you around the pitfalls. The most important habit is to make full use of styles and templates. Never italicize with a control-i or clicking I on the home ribbon. Instead select the appropriate “emphasis” style. Don’t use tabs for indents. Instead, modify the paragraph format for the style you are using. If this is gibberish, the Word documentation explains it much better than I can.
When you start using styles and templates consistently, your formatting problems will diminish or disappear. (And the nav pane becomes amazingly useful.) The gremlins that transform Word docs into mobi files and pdfs will understand you perfectly. Do it another way and the gremlins get confused and you end up making line by line changes.
My second suggestion is to format for CreateSpace first. If you are satisfied with your file for CreateSpace, you will have few or no problems with Kindle. The reverse is not true. A file that is good in Kindle can be a wreck in CreateSpace.
When you have a format that you like and translates well, save it as a template and reuse it. You don’t have to repeat all your formatting fun from the ground up. Improve on the previous template, instead of starting from scratch, unless that is what you want to do.
If you like the tools you are using, by all means, continue to use them. But formatting for e-publishing with Word is quick and easy if you know the ropes.
For reference, I do not and never have worked for Microsoft!
Yes, this is exactly what I do. I write the book with my formatting built in. The only thing I have to do when I’m finished is add fancy scene breaks and links to my other books, website, etc. Easy-breezy.
I did not mention that I find that writing into a Word template than depicts what the reader will see in the product delivered to them helps me evaluate how the text will impact the reader. I like to see what I expect the end reader to see as I type. Word does this fairly well. I don’t know about other tools.
I wondered Democritus if you might know the answers to this, you always understand application so well
“I’ve 2 questions if anyone can help me? Can I use Jutoh or Vellum for poetry without going crazy. Would be pouring from an MS Word file/ mac.
“Also, can jutoh or vellum format for all epub, kindle, kobo, sony ereader, itunes and POD? Sorry to be so ignernt.
“I bought a template from a well known template salesman and it drives us nuts [it’s so complicated and doesnt have a good step by step instruction set]
.So looking around…”
USAF– I considered replying to you yesterday, but I was afraid I would not be helpful. The whole market place of formatting tools for self-publishers smells a little of snake oil to me, but I see that a lot of people people like them and I don’t want to interfere. But I’ll try to help as much as I can. I’ll probably say much more than you want to know.
Formatting is complicated. The modern approach to formatting is to separate content from format. The possible ways a paragraph can be formatted are unlimited. You can indent the first line or mark it off with a preceding blank line. You can right or left justify. The type can be large or small. The font can vary. The rubric is that as an author writes, those details are irrelevant– it is just a paragraph. Let the document designer, or the author when they put on a designer hat, decide on the the details of appearance. The author should only indicate that a paragraph begins here and ends there.
This is a nice clean division of work that, in the abstract, makes sense most of the time. The problem is that we in the software industry took twenty or so years to figure this out, and in a lot of cases, the division makes no sense. Another approach is to let the author make the decisions as they write. Want an indent? Stick in five spaces. Want to end a paragraph? Stick in a carriage-return/line-feed. I call this literal transcription. This works too, and is often less confusing than the more abstract, division-of-work approach. In fact, folks like poets, who are often as concerned with the appearance of their work on the page as much as they are with their words, find this the most natural way to compose.
Fast forward to 2017. Kindle and other publishing platforms are grounded in the division-of-work approach. Why? Because they want the document designer and the device that delivers the content to the reader to make the decisions about the appearance to optimize the end product.
Word processors, Word, Scrivener, LibreOffice Writer, WordPerfect and so on are a mix of division-of-work and literal transcription. Text editors (like NotePad, Vi, Vim, Emacs, etc.) simply translate keystrokes into characters in the file. They are pure literal transcription.
Programmers use text editors to write code because computers interpret code literally, character by character. A coder must have total control of exactly what goes to the computer. Most authors don’t want that kind of control. For instance, an author probably would like each of their paragraphs to start the same– not a blank line sometimes, 4 spaces other times, eight the next– and they would rather just hit the enter key and not worry what they type in to signal the next paragraph. Let the computer do the right thing.
Word processors let you do both. Paragraph ends are marked by hitting the enter key. You can hit the enter key twice for an extra blank line, add a few spaces for an indent, etc. But the word processor has also noted that you marked the end of the paragraph, and they might have some instructions on how you like your paragraphs tucked away somewhere. These instructions are called “styles” in Word, other names in other word processors. If an author is disciplined enough never to put their own extra touches of literal transcription formatting, the result is a consistent document in which every paragraph is formatted according to the styles instructions.
But most of us are not that disciplined. We throw in an extra few spaces for an indent. We change the font and size for emphasis. It’s so easy and the page looks so good! Why bother to create a new style for a special paragraph? And user-friendly word processors are glad to let you do it.
What happens when division-of-labor and literal transcription are mixed? Someone has to write some logic that figures out what to do with the mixture. And here is where we enter the swamp. This is human interpretation and human interpretation is fickle stuff. What is perfectly clear to you is not always clear to the word-processor programmer and things start to get muddled. Did you really mean to insert a tab there? The programmer will make a guess and propound some rule like “When there is a paragraph style, ignore tabs and extra CR-LFs after paragraph marks.” That might satisfy most of time, but not all the time, and the word processor displays strange things.
It gets worse when you start translating files, like docx to mobi, epub, or pdf. The translation tool, (Amazon’s docx to mobi translator, Calibre, Vellum, etc.) looks over the word processor file and starts making inferences from the stuff in the word processor file. Often, they are very good inferences and the result is amazing. But they are inferences made by the program that depend on how clever the tool programmers are at inferring from the melange of symbols in the word processor doc what the final design should be and how Kindle will display mobi, Kobo will display ePub, etc.
This is where the snake oil comes in. The inferences are always an approximation and what works well on my doc may not work well on yours. It might be consistently good on your documents, maybe not. If it works well for you a few times, you are satisfied and you write a good review. If it generates a mess, not so good a review.
Experienced designers learn the quirks of each tool and use them to their advantage. That’s often after many hard-learned lessons.
What is the self-publisher to do? Hire an experienced designer. Strap them down with a tight contract that guarantees acceptable results. Costly and often not necessary, but effective.
Learn the hard lessons yourself. Costly in its own way because it takes time and study. You may have to learn mark-up languages before you are satisfied with your results. No matter what, it is a lot of work.
Now back to USAF’s question. I don’t know how effective any particular tool is in general, and it all depends on the word processor document the tool has to start with. My best advice is to get free copies of the tools and experiment.
Further advice is to give the translation tools a leg up. Be disciplined in your use of word processors. Use styles as much as possible. I have never had much trouble with any translation tool if I am disciplined in the word processor. But I have the advantage of being mark-up language literate and having coded a word processor or two way back when. I am old-fashioned: I prefer sharpening my skills with one or two tools rather than getting new ones. When I was a carpenter, I obsessed on sharpening my chisels and could often mortise in a hinge before the next guy could set up his router.
You might seek out an experienced technical writer with whom to discuss your use of word processor styles. I run into them everywhere; they are often battle-scarred formatting veterans and they are often absolute whizzes with their tools. A few paid hours might give you the tips you need to get through your problem.
I apologize for this long reply with no real answer.
Good information, DJ. Thanks for taking the time to share.
My pleasure!
dang democritus, I knew you would know lots of things I had no idea about. Thanks man, for explaining so much and It will be helpful to others too, I know.
There are times when I wish we could all just have a big bar b que under big sky country here and just sit back and listen and learn from so many like you democritus who are studied and insightful.
“I apologize for this long reply with no real answer.”
Don’t apologize. There was no one purely correct answer to the question. By explaining the question better you helped show the rest of us how/why there can be no one simple answer.
Wow, is Scrivener yesterday’s news? I just can’t seem to stop aging.
Dan
Be aware that Word can add all sorts of HTML cruft making your file much, much bigger than it needs to be. I only use Word for the print version, and to hand to my editor. It is too much of a pain for ebook formatting at any stage. (And I can format a book in about the same time, now that I know what I’m doing).
Mourn, mourn the loss of WordPerfect!
Sigil for me, for the ebook — I’m a control junkie, and I like the ability to include stylistic flourishes and wildly elaborate and accurately formatted internal metadata.
And Word for the Createspace template — once you’ve done one book, it’s easy to keep using the template.
Word messed up my print file pdf: it separated the combination em-dash/end double quotes so that the double quotes ended up on the next line several times. What decent program leaves a single double-quote mark at the beginning of a line, and claims to deal with widows and orphans properly?
Four or five times randomly throughout the 167K book. I didn’t catch them.
When I saw the title for the article, I about died. If it still took me 30 minutes to format my ebooks, I wouldn’t do it. So grateful for Jutoh. One to two minutes to format a book, no bells and whistles, and my readers are happy.
Another Vellum fan here 🙂
Another vote for Vellum. As for some of the fancier things, consider creating a JPEG for the fancy title page and using that. Ditto for custom scene breaks. Use an image instead. Which you can drag and drop if necessary.
I was in the beta print program. I’ve been impressed with the Vellum customer support.
I recommend Vellum for every new indie writer. Can I make prettier print books using InDesign? Yes. And for some clients, it’s required. But Vellum print is good enough for most books. And it takes 10 minutes.
You do realize that all those non-transparent images break horribly when I read the book on a sepia background?
Agree, use gifs, which can be transparent against assorted backgrounds. Particularly grey gifs, which can survive a black background.
I’ve heard, but can’t verify, that Apple is the only retailer that will accept gifs in ebook files.
Kindle will. The tech people didn’t say differently. I was about to pass on what I’ve heard about Kindle not honoring the transparency of png files, but I’ve since heard that it’s a question of file size. If the file size is small, a gif and a png may keep their transparencies, but above a certain limit (not sure what it is) they may be converted to jpgs. Some experimentation may be in order…
A Scrivener user here. Thirty seconds for a Kindle file from the document. Takes longer to check it than make it. You’d have to pay me a lot to use Word.
lol – I use StoryBox, which is very similar to Scrivener, to do the same thing. It makes creating mobi and epub files super easy.
I’ve heard that you can create ebooks directly from Word files and I guess, if the file is very ‘clean’ it should be possible. But the instant you start using functions like ‘Track Changes’, Word puts in all sorts of hidden stuff that plays havoc with ebook formatting so…-shrug-…I’m not completely convinced by the article.
StoryBox is Windows only, looks like, a non-starter for me. But maybe someone else will like it, too.
Yes, it’s Windows only but for MAC users there’s a very similar dedicated writing package called Scrivener. In fact, Scrivener is now available for both Mac and Windows.
When I first started looking for a better writing software tool, Scrivener was only available for MAC. So I went with StoryBox and have loved it ever since.
Word adds all sorts of stuff anyway. If you want to terrify yourself, paste a few paragraphs of your Word file into https://word2cleanhtml.com/ and look at the dirty code.
Oh, excellent link, thank you!
I discovered the cruft when I tested Jutoh at work. Oh my goodness. I’ve always been a WordPerfect fangirl and one reason is because they are actually coding the document (hence the reveal codes feature that worked as it should).
Seeing for myself that Microsoft Word is basically painting the words just … *shudders*. I spent a lot of time cleaning up in Sigil.
Yes, in a better world, WordPerfect would still be making a version for the Mac! I use the Mac version of Word to format mss, but will explore Vellum.
Another Vellum person here. If formatting took 30 minutes, I’d pay someone else to do it (and this is exactly what I used to do!). It’s drag-and-drop in Vellum.
You mean I don’t have to go from Word to html to that little kindlegen at the Dos prompt?
Dang …
now that Vellum can do paperbacks, there’s little reason to use anything else. What used to take me an hour to do in Word to fit CreateSpace’s finicky requirements takes me literally two minutes in Vellum
I’ve used Word, the Guido Henckels method, Jutoh, and Vellum. I stopped using the first two when I bought Jutoh. The last book I formatted was in Jutoh, because I haven’t figured out how to do certain things in Vellum that are quite simple in Jutoh, like custom scene breaks or fancy title pages. Vellum’s fast and mostly pretty (some of the title page choices are a little odd). It’s not an option unless you use a Mac, or Mac-in-Cloud. I use it for things that only need to be fast and pretty, and use Jutoh for anything that needs to look Just So.
If you have a method that works, and Jutoh certainly does the job, keep doing it.
I use Vellum… you upload a word doc and can do ebooks or POD’s and with different styles, too. It’s amazing (Mac only, however).
I second Vellum, especially now that it also produces print-ready PDFs. I used to do all my formatting with Scrivener, but abandoned it for Vellum. I can go from a Word file to an upload-ready, beautifully formatted ebook in about five minutes.
Vellum is extremely expensive in comparison ($249), but it is also incredibly easy to use and produces beautiful ebooks and print books. You can also try Vellum for free, just by downloading it. Every bit of functionality is in the downloaded version except the ability to generate ebook and print files.
I strongly recommend anyone with access to a Mac give Vellum a try. Disclaimer: I don’t have any professional connection to Vellum other than that of an enthusiastic user.
Plus you can do constant updates always… I’m amazed, really, and you can select your types, etc. It’s made my life so much simpler.
I also use Vellum (ebook only). I even bought a pretty cheap used Mac to run it (and I kind of hate Mac). The program is indeed very easy to use. Some people swear by hand-coding all the formatting, but I know that’s not in my skill set. Vellum has worked well for me so far, though I’m sure there’s still fiddling I need to do to get optimal use for my next release.
I haven’t done a paperback release yet, but I think I’ll format some things myself (because I feel reasonably comfortable with that at this point) and for the bigger projects, I’d like to hire a professional designer who could really make it pop.
Don’t waste your money on a pro. Lawrence Block Indy published his book _The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons_. The pro he hired used the CreateSpace template, with almost no change and charged him for the work done.
How It’s Done: Work Flow in Indie Book Production
https://jwmanus.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/how-its-done-work-flow-in-indie-book-production/
I bought the book, because I love Block, fired up Word, and I was able to duplicate the book page for page.
Read through her post and see what I mean. DIY is the best way to go. If something needs fixing, you can fix it, not somebody else charging billable hours.
Obviously not all “pros” are equal, and I would look at a lot of examples of the person’s work before paying for it. Some layout designers I’ve seen can really make an interior into something unique that a template just can’t do.
+1 at looking at the portfolio.
There’s an indie whose books I’ve loved, but the formatting of their print books indicates that the typesetter who did it ripped them off. The interior of the book is visually distinctive from a tradpub book in a bad way, as in the person not knowing Basic Layout 101.
I so want to volunteer to fix it …
You are better off going DIY. Find “books” that you love and try to duplicate the layout.
I routinely try to duplicate other books to see how things were done, to learn the “language” of book design. Each time I do my own books I consider the changes in “page count”, that is where the cost comes in. Every page you add makes the POD more expensive.
Fire up the CreateSpace page and look at the “Royalties” tab.
https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/
Notice, that no matter what “trim size” you choose for your book, it’s the “Number of Pages” that determines the price. Enter 300 pages, with $12, and vary the “trim size”, you will see that the numbers stay the same. Now change the number of pages and see the prices fluctuate.
A book is a container to hold the Story. No matter what book by somebody else that I duplicate to see how they designed their book, I return to the simple 6×9, half inch margins, 0.25 gutter, Garamond 11, single space. The only thing I play with is the white space in the chapter titles. No matter what I put in there, the “page count” doesn’t change.
You can go through a dozen variations of your own book to find what you like, at no cost. Go with a pro, and the billable hours will stop you from experimenting, fast.
I paid someone to reformat my book a few years ago. He was very proud of his hand-coding and it sounded impressive, but it came out looking sort of like the lines were scrunched together. I wasn’t a big fan of it, but hey, it was hand-coded! For the five previous years I had just used plain old Word formatting so I figured hand-coded html had to be better. The hand-coding was acceptable but not very pretty and then I realized I couldn’t go in and add anything like new updates or even correct a typo without going through him. I was going to go back to my regular Word file that had worked for me for me up to that point. No, it didn’t have pretty scene separators or cool chapter number formatting, but it worked just fine.
A few months later I learned of Vellum and have been using Macincloud with it. I get the cheapest subscription to it so I can use both Vellum and Macincloud whenever I need to. The Vellum formatted book looks so much better than the hand-coded book.
I haven’t yet upgraded to the print version because I had just finished formatting my latest book the week before the print version of Vellum came out but I might splurge on it in the future.
Are you changing the subject, or is that meant to be a reply to my post? Because I said I was considering hiring a pro for the paperback, not for the ebook. I just find it odd that you responded to my post saying I might hire a pro to design the paperback with an explanation of why you don’t pay people to code your ebooks.
I dunno. I always use Sigil to make my epubs, because 1.) it’s free, and 2.) if anything looks weird, you can dive into the HTML to fix it.
I’d like to know if Word could handle some fairly standard things like:
– Correctly marking the beginning of the book, causing Kindle to open to the desired page and skip the front matter.
– Marking the end of the book, so the Amazon “end of book” popup (which is, IMHO, the best way to sell more books, assuming you have other books to sell) occurs when you want it to occur (possibly before the bonus chapter and/or beg for reviews)
– Include custom fonts — if it’s important for your brand
– Output in multiple formats
In other words, figure out what features you really want, then see if Word provides them.
Word can handle a good deal of heavy lifting if you’re good with using Styles and the Table of Contents function. The beginning and end of book issue are solved with using Heading styles and then building a Table of Contents off that, because the Amazon Kindle conversion process uses those tags to make its own internal tags.
Embedding custom fonts is a little harder, but can also be done with Styles – just be aware that the customer can always override custom fonts in their reader, so it’s often not even worth bothering!
I’m always baffled by all the hand-wringing over formatting. I just upload the Word document and have rarely found problems in the resulting conversion. Links work, pages flow, centering and line breaks are come out as I want and scene breaks appear as expected. I even had a table for a translation glossary in my science fantasy novel, it it worked fine, too. Granted, I haven’t had success trying to insert special fonts, but I can live with that.
Maybe this is more of an issue for non-fiction and/or graphic-heavy books?