A Stranger In Paris: Formatting Ebooks and PODs. Louis Shalako.

An ebook marketing image does not have a 'trim area'.

Louis Shalako 

On formatting A Stranger In Paris, Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery, #9.

I have page numbers for the text, none in the front and end matter. I have the simplest of headers. I may fool with the size, font, and in previous books I have had that in dark grey rather than black. I may make the page number bigger or bolder. It took some fiddling, as I hadn't done page numbers in about six years. Now that the fucky part is done, now I go through and justify right by scene and chapter, without disturbing the centering of chapter titles and scene breaks. The bulk of the formatting is pretty clean, as the ebook file made it through the Smashwords Meatgrinder on the second try. Ebooks have flowing text, which automatically justifies to the left, with a ragged right edge in your .doc file.

The next stage would be to size that in 5"x 8" and then in pocketbook, (using page size features in Word), which works out to 4.25" x 6.88" approx. The biggest effing challenge is to modify the cover image so the text does not stray into the trim area in the Print On Demand (POD) product. This is not so much of a consideration with the ebook product.

I take the ebook and 'save as' StrangerPOD5x8, for example. (You can have spaces in there, but I never do.)

Close the ebook, open up the new file and that's the starting point for the print product.

Always, at the end of a work-binge, email the latest copy to yourself, this includes covers, blurbs, the original, clean marketing image. All that stuff. You will thank me someday, if you can remember…with Lulu, you can download your original file, with Smashwords as well. 

Very handy when the computer has a meltdown…

It gets to the point where I am edging the text a little further up, a little further down, a little closer to the spine and the edge of the page using 'margins' and stuff like that. The old Createspace viewer had dotted lines showing the printed area. If the text was very much smaller, you were wasting paper on some level, and also producing a funny-looking book with a tiny block of text in the middle of a pretty big white sheet of paper.

The text must never extend beyond those dotted lines.

You are basically just trying to make it look nice and professional.

In a subtle form of protest, I do not use block paragraphs at the beginning of chapter and scene. My first six books were unpublished but heavily-rejected manuscripts and quite frankly I never even noticed. I was doing ebooks exclusively at first, all my own works.

There was no customer to keep me honest or to point out the mistake when I went to do paperbacks.

Pro tip: go to your bookshelf and look at the formatting of a good quality book. Once I realized the error, I just kept doing it. My revenge for 1,168+ rejection slips. In a paperback, I will need to remove the page of links, internal navigation for the ebook. I will need to insert blank pages, but that's pretty much it.

Chapter One should be page one—sometimes you have to mess around with it. I had to choose ‘zero’ for the starting point rather than ‘one’, which will not be immediately obvious to the person doing the formatting. You have to turn off ‘link to previous section’, otherwise front or end matter will have page numbers and my book would begin on page four. That’s just dumb, ladies and gentlemen…

The ebook is loaded up but not published. Why not release them all at once, if I can possibly do it, to Lulu, Amazon, wherever I can get them in print, or ebooks on Kobo and Google Play, for example. Smashwords and Draft2Digital are one company now, and Smashwords distributes ebooks to a number of platforms including Scribd and iTunes.

A blank page to put your autograph on. Okay, that’s a joke, but a sheet of paper has two sides. An ebook can have an odd number of pages, a paperback or hardcover cannot. (An odd number of sheets will still have two sides and add up to an even number of printable pages, blank or otherwise.) I will insert two blank pages, have a title page, the back of that can have the copyright stuff, (front matter), two more blank pages and then it’s Chapter One/page one.

Same thing more or less at the end of the book, which must come out to an even number of pages. I don’t know if this is much help to you, but it actually was of some help to me—after all, it has been six years.

 

#Louis

 

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Louis has books and stories on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, as well as the sites mentioned above.

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Thank you for reading.