Category: Formatting

As people tackle the subject of e-book formatting, every once in a while I receive an email with the question, what meta-data in an e-book are actually used for. Since you will have to re-upload your book description, the ISBN and the keyword tags on every distribution channel’s portal again and again, the question clearly becomes, why am I entering… Continue reading "Meta-data… what are they good for?"

This is the ninth installment of a series of articles. To read the previous one, please click here Okay, it is time for me to finally make good on my promise and turn your book’s HTML source file into a proper eBook. All we need is a little software called Calibre that you can download here. I want to take… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part IX)"

This is the eighth installment of a series of articles. To read the previous one, please click here Last time I promised you I’d cover some more frills for your eBook formatting, and as you’d certainly agree, images are a big part of that. Even for fiction writers images offer great opportunities to present your book in the best possible… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part VIII)"

This is the seventh installment of a series of articles. To read the previous one, please click here As you can probably tell by now from the last installment, we are by now getting pretty close to real tangible results that you can actually use, so let’s press on without delay. The first thing we are going to do next… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part VII)"

This is the sixth installment of a series of articles. To read the previous one, please click here Time for the clean-up of your manuscript Now that we’ve exhaustively covered the preliminaries, it is finally time to put it all to work for us and begin creating an actual eBook source file. I know you’ve been waiting for this with… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part VI)"

This is the fifth installment of a series of articles. To read the previous one, please click here Now that we’ve seen some of the structural basics of HTML, it is time to examine how you can affect the actual look of these elements. The easiest, most efficient and most reliable way is through so-called style. A style sheet is… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part V)"

This is the fourth installment of a series of articles. To read the previous one, please click here The basics of HTML Finally, with all the preliminaries out of the way, we are finally ready to descend into the real machinations of eBook creation, but since we will be working with HTML for the next few chapters, let me explain… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part IV)"

This is the third installment of a series of articles. To read the previous one, please click here The Road to Right After having spent a lot of time in my last installment, telling you how you should not create an eBook, I will no longer hold you back with explanations of Wrong and instead we will point our heads… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part III)"

This is the second installment of a series of articles. To read the first one, please click here Why you shouldn’t use a word processor When I visit message boards for authors on the the Internet I keep coming across the same question over and over again, followed by what is effectively the same advice over and again. Sadly, in… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part II)"

To me, one of the key elements that sets apart a professional eBook release from that of an amateur has always been the technical presentation of the book. Sure, anyone can write a document in a word processor, run it through some export tool, use a fully automated conversion utility or peruse the services of an online service, but the… Continue reading "Take pride in your eBook formatting"