Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Sept 29, 2020 20:52:20 GMT
If you're a newbie formatting your ebooks and paperbacks can seem daunting and scary, but it's really not. You have a choice between very simple (for ebooks, anyway) and extremely time consuming if you choose to be fancy. Formatting for paperbacks is harder, but it's not that hard.
My very first ebook was a children's picture book, and even that wasn't hard. Ebooks are super easy, which is why I love them. But paperback formatting is the bane of my existence.
For ebooks all you need to know is to never, ever use the "tab" key. I don't use that key, anyway. But if you're someone, who does - stop! Tabs will mess up paragraphs, I've heard. Use the enter key whenever you want to start a new paragraph.
Use heading 1 for your chapter headings because that setting is how you create your table of contents. You don't need a TOC if you don't have chapters, but if your book contains chapters a lack of a clickable table of contents will annoy readers and make your book look unprofessional.
It doesn't matter which font you write in, or which font size, since readers will use their own preferred settings on their ereaders. And ebooks don't need page numbers since ebooks don't have pages. They have screens, and the number of screens depends on the size of the screen they're using, and the font size they employ. I have bad eyes, so I use the huge font in Calibre.
Amazon accepts many different formats, it's up to you which one you choose. I typically upload a doc. Back when I was wide, I would upload to Draft 2 Digital, first, and then I'd download the epub, mobi, and pdf that they generated for me, and I'd upload the mobi. But a doc or a docx file works just as well.
If you want to include images in your ebook remember to insert image, don't upload it. And it's a good idea to insert a page break in between each chapter, if you want an empty screen in between each one, rather than trying to backspace it in.
You can create a template in your word processor and set it to your preferred paragraph indentation, line spacing, margins, etc, then save the template to make formatting easier.
For paperback formatting I'll let amazon explain it for me.
kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202145400
If anyone here is a fancy formatter, feel free to add in an explanation of how you do it, and why.
And if you're a newbie with formatting questions, don't be shy. Jump in and ask!
My very first ebook was a children's picture book, and even that wasn't hard. Ebooks are super easy, which is why I love them. But paperback formatting is the bane of my existence.
For ebooks all you need to know is to never, ever use the "tab" key. I don't use that key, anyway. But if you're someone, who does - stop! Tabs will mess up paragraphs, I've heard. Use the enter key whenever you want to start a new paragraph.
Use heading 1 for your chapter headings because that setting is how you create your table of contents. You don't need a TOC if you don't have chapters, but if your book contains chapters a lack of a clickable table of contents will annoy readers and make your book look unprofessional.
It doesn't matter which font you write in, or which font size, since readers will use their own preferred settings on their ereaders. And ebooks don't need page numbers since ebooks don't have pages. They have screens, and the number of screens depends on the size of the screen they're using, and the font size they employ. I have bad eyes, so I use the huge font in Calibre.
Amazon accepts many different formats, it's up to you which one you choose. I typically upload a doc. Back when I was wide, I would upload to Draft 2 Digital, first, and then I'd download the epub, mobi, and pdf that they generated for me, and I'd upload the mobi. But a doc or a docx file works just as well.
If you want to include images in your ebook remember to insert image, don't upload it. And it's a good idea to insert a page break in between each chapter, if you want an empty screen in between each one, rather than trying to backspace it in.
You can create a template in your word processor and set it to your preferred paragraph indentation, line spacing, margins, etc, then save the template to make formatting easier.
For paperback formatting I'll let amazon explain it for me.
kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202145400
If anyone here is a fancy formatter, feel free to add in an explanation of how you do it, and why.
And if you're a newbie with formatting questions, don't be shy. Jump in and ask!
