I bought a Kobo ereader as a Christmas present for myself. Yeah, I know that most people get a Kindle, but I’m different than most. When I bought my Kobo I was so excited. Owning it has changed my reading habits. I find that I read more and I read a wider variety of books.
Being able to read ebooks on an actual ereader has really helped me with my ebook formatting issues. Prior to getting my ereader, I uploaded my novel onto Amazon’s KTP site as a doc file. The information on the site says you can upload doc files so I assumed that it would be fine. Well it wasn’t. Once KTP converted my file the indentations in my book were all messed up. Lines that were supposed to be indented weren’t indented and vice versa. I tried a few different methods to fix my doc file and re-upload it, but it kept turning out the same way once it was uploaded. Finally, I gave up and left it that way thinking that I probably wasn’t the only one with that problem so it was probably fine to leave it that way. Sometimes I can be so lame.
Buying my Kobo allowed me to see how other ebooks were formatted and made me want to do something about the formatting of my ebook.
You can hire someone to format your ebook for you. That’s the easier way to go. You don’t have to worry about learning a whole new skill set to get your ebook published. You can just hire someone who has those skills already.
If you don’t have to budget for hiring someone or you’re the type of person who insists on doing everything yourself you, you’ll have to learn some HTML. Don’t be scared. It really isn’t as hard as it sounds. In order to get the best result when uploading your book onto Amazon KTP you should upload it as an HTML file.
When I fixed the formatting of my book I did so by uploading my doc file to KTP and previewing the file. When you preview your book you’ll notice that at the top of the preview window is a download HTML option. When you download the HTML from the preview you’ll get a giant document that is full of messed up HTML code. To format your novel you’ll need to clean up that code. I did it in a simple HTML editor called Arachnophilia that I downloaded online years ago for building my content websites.
I bought Kindle Formatting the Complete Guide because I really didn’t know what the heck I was doing. The book is easy to understand and will walk you through several different methods you can use for formatting your book. If your formatting your book for Kindle I highly recommend buying this book. It will help you create a professional looking ebook. You can check out that book here.
Publishing your book on Smashwords will require different formatting than what you used for the Kindle. Smashwords doesn’t accept HTML files. You’ll need to upload your book as a doc file and their required formatting is quite specific. Smashwords has a thorough style guide. You can download it here.