Comments on: Take pride in your eBook formatting

By: J Thomas Beaton

J Thomas Beaton — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:31:40 +0000

Hi Guido – do you know of a good instructional site or blog like this one where creation of a bespoke dictionary is so clearly laid out? i have been searching but only get a few vague references to automatic pgms that I’d rather no use, having seen what they did to my first attempts of my ebooks. Thanks very much.

By: Guido

Guido — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:56:35 +0000

More and more eBook readers now support custom font, so you could go that route, but you should be aware that you’d still be cutting out a large portion of the market, namely those with Kindle 1, Kindle 2, original Nooks, etc. You will have to weigh your options, becasue using image files has severe drawbacks as well, not the least of which is their size, of course, and the fact that they don’t scale well.

By: Lance Foster

Lance Foster — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:15:20 +0000

I wrote a bilingual book that uses English and Yoruba. Yoruba uses a particular kind of font. Since you say that most eBook readers do not support font embedding, then it seems the only way I can publish this as an ebook (it is about 26 pages long) is to handle each page as a jpg, including the text, rather than as text (because the Yoruba text uses orthography that needs a particular font)?

By: Kelly

Kelly — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:06:33 +0000

How do you use find and replace for quotes, etc in Scrivener?

By: Guido

Guido — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:50:04 +0000

Since most eBook readers do not support font embedding, there’s no good way to do this. You could save the passages as images and insert them, but that will take a lot of storage space.

By: Ksenia Anske

Ksenia Anske — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 18:31:53 +0000

Guido, thank you for the fantastic article. I’m still a few months away from being ready to publish, but have already started looking for a formatting guide to deliver an extraordinary experience to the readers. I’m writing my YA 1st novel that I want to look akin to a hand-written diary. Do you have any tips on how to insert written comments into typed text – as if they were made by hand? Or, should I shelve the idea?

By: Guido

Guido — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 03:39:26 +0000

It is very easy and straight forward. Just take a closer look here – http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp

By: Gabriel Beyers

Gabriel Beyers — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 02:08:30 +0000

Hello Guido,

Once again, thank you for these informative posts. I hired out my first book’s formatting, but now I find myself a bit short of cash and am looking into formatting my next book. It’s fairly straightforward, so I think I can follow your instructions.

My only problem right now is I would like to have some hyperlinks in the book, like links to my other books, my Facebook page, etc.

Could you explain how to format links? I would really appreciate it.

By: Guido

Guido — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:16:15 +0000

Personally, I’m a huge fan of Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php). I’ve written all my books using that software can say nothing but good things about it. I don’t think a regular word processor like Pages is really all that great to write books, for the sole reason that it is not possible to organize things such as research, ideas, references, links, etc. The result is always a tedious clutter somewhere on your hard drive. Scrivener helps in that way by keeping it all together, neatly organized and immediately accessible.

By: Salvatore Pedi

Salvatore Pedi — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:06:20 +0000

Guido…

I’m making some preparations to write my very first ebook for Amazon’s kindle. This is the first step for me as I’ve never written a book before.

My main problem at this stage is to find the proper format (or, word processing) to write my story with. I’m using an Apple iMac…. I currently have “PAGES O9 ” but, I’m not sure if I could use that..

I’d surely appreciate any information you could give me.

Thanks……salvatore pedi