Format an eBook in Minutes

Don't spend $$$ for something you can do yourself in 30 Minutes or Less

(Note: This is part of a course covering all aspects of eBook and paperback formatting for indie authors and publishers including lessons on cover design and layout. Click here for more information.)

When I’m talking to people about indie publishing, they believe that formatting an eBook is especially difficult. They seem to think that it involves a lot of technical expertise and computer programming.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If you have a word processor like MS Word, you can format an eBook in just a few minutes. What follows is for a simple book manuscript without tables or embedded images. I cover those in the full course.

Step One: Clean Up Your Document

By this, I mean to get rid of a lot of extra things you might have added to your manuscript, such as headers, footers, and page numbers.

At the end of each chapter add a hard page break by hitting control-enter on a windows machine or command-enter on a Mac. That way your next chapter starts on a new page.

Think about an eBook as water and the eBook reader as a vessel. The water takes the form of the container it is poured into. Your document needs to create “flowable” text. Your book could be read on a Kindle device, a smartphone, a laptop, or a tablet. Likewise, the user can, and will, change the font style and size, line spacing, color, and margins. You don’t control the look of your eBook. That is mostly determined by the device used and the reader’s preferences.

Step Two: Style Chapter Headings

Depending on how skilled you are with a word processor, you might have set all your chapter headings just by highlighting them and setting the font size, color, and style. There is a simpler way and one that will make your manuscript more eBook friendly. Use font styles.

If you are using Word, you probably have seen in the ribbon something that looks like a capital A with a paintbrush called “Styles.” If you click that icon, you will see a bunch of styles the only ones you need to concern yourself with are “normal” and those beginning with the word “Heading.”

Heading 1 is the style you will be most concerned with now. Every chapter heading needs to be styled as Heading 1.

You want to start by modifying the properties of that style. Right-click on the style and choose “modify.” You will get a screen that gives you several options. You can set the font family, whether it is bold, italicized, or normal, justification, and color. By clicking the “Format” button, you can find even more options.

One that you may want to adjust is the “Paragraph” setting. You will see an option for setting the space before and after the “paragraph,” which, in this case, is a heading. There is a default setting, but by increasing or decreasing that setting can create the exact amount of separation between the heading and the start of the text.

Step Three: Style the Body Text

The body text will be listed as “normal” in the style settings. Here are a few suggestions. Nothing is chiseled in stone here, but a few things I’ve found that work for me.

First, I set the font size at 11 points. I find that to be easier to read on handheld devices like a smartphone or tablet.

Second, I set the default font to a sans-serif font like Calibri or Arial. Studies show that sans-serif fonts are easier to read than something like Times New Roman. I’m thinking that maybe they need to change the name of that font. It’s been Times New Roman since I was in college in the early 70s. It’s not really that new anymore.

Third, in the paragraph settings, I set the indentation for the first line at 0.25 inches. The default is .5, but on a mobile device that is too big.

Fourth, I leave the before and after settings in their default, but set the line spacing to 1.05. It’s just a tiny bit airier than the default single space.

Fifth, decide if you want to have a space between paragraphs. In a blog article or website, the default of adding a space works well. However, some people prefer their eBooks to look more like print books and not add the space between paragraphs. I split the difference. My nonfiction books have a line and no indentation for the paragraphs. My novels have the indentation and no line space. It’s really up to you.

Step Four: Add a Table of Contents

Before the first page of your book, you need to add a table of contents. Create the page. Click the “Insert” tab on the ribbon. Then click “Link” and choose “bookmark.” Add the bookmark “toc” (without the quotation marks). This tells the Kindle program that this page is where to find the table of contents.

To add the table of contents, place the cursor at the place on your page where you want to place the first link. Click the “References” tab, choose Table of Contents, and select the “Custom” option.

Uncheck the box for page numbers (they are irrelevant in an eBook) but be sure the hyperlink box is checked. Change the number of levels to 1. Hit OK.

That’s it. You can now upload your docx file directly to Kindle. To make this even easier, just set up your MS Word preferences so that when you are writing your books, you use the styles and paragraph settings you need for publishing.

This takes longer to describe than to do. It takes 15-20 minutes to do if you are working from scratch. Less than that if you set the styles before you began writing.

So, there it is, a simple way to save up to several hundred dollars on formatting fees.