The self-publishing journey isn't always easy or cheap. Some things—like editing and cover design—should be left to paid professionals, but you can save money and achieve great results formatting your own e-book.
DIY e-book formatting may seem daunting, but new tools—paid and free—make it fairly easy for most fiction manuscripts. These tools are discussed early in this guide so you will have a short read if one of them works for you.
If your manuscript is more complicated (e.g., a nonfiction book with tables, list items, images, footnotes, and other specially formatted elements), this guide will explain everything you need to produce a professional and pleasing e-book. Advanced formatting is accomplished with HTML and CSS, but you won't need any prior experience or knowledge of either of these as the guide includes a tutorial to teach you everything you need to know.
The end result of using this book will be a well-formatted EPUB e-book that can be submitted to Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Nook, and any other e-book publishing platform (NOTE: if you are looking at other guides that mention needing a MOBI file for Amazon, you are looking at an outdated guide as that is no longer best practice).
Here are some specific things that you will get from reading this book.
- A discussion of some useful tools, including Atticus, BBEdit, BlueGriffon, Calibre, Draft2Digital, Jutoh, Kindle Create, Kindle Previewer, LibreOffice Writer, Notepad++, Online HTML editors, Reedsy Book Editor, and Vellum.
- Pluses and minuses of using Microsoft Word.
- How to create a standard, clickable table of contents.
- How to create a "logical" table of contents (used for the "Go To" menu or sidebar on your e-reading device or app).
- HTML and CSS (styling) basics and a look at specific issues that are relevant to e-books and Amazon Kindle e-books in particular.
- A template with HTML and CSS code that should work for any type of book formatting need.
- How to create "standard" paragraph styles for different types of books.
- How to add drop caps or small caps to your initial chapter paragraphs.
- How to format complex elements such as internal and external links, images, tables, list items, block quotations, special fonts, and more.
- How to create a final EPUB document (with proper metadata and cover art) from your original document or from an HTML version.
- How to check your final EPUB for errors before submitting to online publishers.
- An appendix summarizing the author's personal process to use as a quick checklist reference.
