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’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.So looking around…
I would be curious what the file size looks like with this method. An incautious approach to creating your .mobi file will cost you money in transfer fees.
The file size is quite tidy assuming you’re not including many images – and frankly, that’s where this method falls down, on images. Word isn’t your friend for that (sensibly, as it’s a WORD processor). If you do heavily illustrated books, you’re far better off with a program that was made specifically for book formatting and you’ll get a smaller .mobi in the end.
Another vote for Vellum. I even bought a used Mac for the purpose. 🙂
Before that I used Scrivener, which is completely painless. But then something changed, and it started dropping empty lines, so that text was running up against quote attributes. Ugly.
It’s been years since I tried uploading a Word doc directly, and that was a catastrophe. Might be better now.
Anybody have experience with Vellum and picture-heavy books?
I write mainly instructional manuals; my latest has 160 pics. So I need software that is good for that. Been looking around but very few people seem to have experience with such books via Vellum or Scrivener.
For the moment: Word is the tool I am forced to use…
I don’t, but I’m pretty sure the Vellum people have said that the program (currently) is intended for novels, not books with lots of graphic components.
I haven’t actually heard tell of any program that’s great for that sort of book.
OK, thanks Shawna!
Maybe try Blurb. When I was taking a Lynda.com tutorial on InDesign the instructor mentioned using Blurb for his ebooks. They cater to photo-heavy books as well. It may be worth a look.
Thanks Jamie, I’ll check them out. Hadn’t heard of Blurb before.
If you’re in KU, you might use Vellum or Jutoh for the boost to KNPC count via hidden characters.
But I don’t believe readers care about “nice” ebook formatting. They may notice pretty extras like fluerons for a split second, and then they forget about it as they become immersed in a good story. (one hopes) It’s an ebook; it’s not like a leather-bound illustrated copy of Moby-Dick people are going to want to fondle over and over. Spending hours of time on kerning would be a waste of hours of time I could spend writing more books.
For me: three styles applied in Word from the get-go via a template, save as .rtf to eliminate the occasional odd character MS Word can insert, and I’m outta there. I’m a full-time writer, and I note this option doesn’t seem to hurt my sales.
It often doesn’t show immediately in sales, nor is there any way to measure. Where it does show up quite clearly is in reviews where the person knocks off a star for bad formatting, moving you from a 4 to a 3,or a 5 to a 4. Readers do notice and buyers read their reviews… even one mention is enough for some to skip it altogether.
You are completely wrong about this; and it sounds dangerously close to what I hear from struggling businesses who believe customers can’t “tell the difference” between quality and crap so they proffer crap.
Just recently we had a local restaurant that had been around for decades but ended up on the brink of bankruptcy. Why? Because new management had taken over and brought that “customers don’t care about quality” attitude. They were convinced that diners didn’t care if they substituted tasty ingredients for cheap ones, but customers did notice and they stopped going.
Don’t be that business.
I will return books that are poorly formatted. I will leave you poor reviews. I have had it with books that have cramped, fixed line heights that can’t be adjusted because the producer couldn’t be bothered to read the instructions on how to set them: use ems and percents. A minimum of 1.2 em or 120% for your line height.
I don’t get immersed into stories that are hostile on my eyes; I simply ask for refunds and leave detailed explanations when Amazon asks why.
I absolutely check formatting reviews on any e-book I’m about to buy. Amazon offers the option of letting you select for Kindle-specific reviews and that’s what I look for. If readers mention the poor formatting, lack of table of contents, dead-end footnotes, typos and other errors I’m not buying.
Quality matters. Believe it.
I’m a Jutoh man myself (ported over from Word). I was using Sigil until they stopped supporting it. I find Jutoh has a cleaner interface and better result. CreateSpace template and Word for the print version.