This post is random bits of information and thoughts about self-publishing an ebook, based off an online conversation I had with my buddy J. Dane Tyler.
There are two great places to distribute your book in electronic format.
If you are lazy and only want to choose one, choose smashwords. Smashwords not only sells ebooks from their own store, but they distribute to several other stores: Barnes & Noble, Sony eBook Store, KoBo, Amazon, and the Apple Store. Smashwords takes a 15% cut of your profits to distribute. That’s great for the stores you can’t get into by yourself, but hey, that’s like an extra dime for every sale if you set it up yourself. So, yes, you can get a higher royalty if you set up Amazon separately, but there’s no shame in only wanting to manage your ebook in one place.
Thoughts on formatting an HTML file.
Here’s the basic idea: use your word processor’s “export” or “Save As html” to get a basic html document.
Your word processor is almost certainly going to add in a bunch of html tags that you don’t want. To fix this, you need to get really familiar with your plain text editor’s “Find and Replace” function. If you only have notepad, I’d suggest downloading Notepad++. As you look at the text, it may have tags that look like this:
<p style=’font-size:10pt;font-family:tahoma;’>
You may want to find and replace them down to <p>
You will also want to remove any extra line breaks. Because eBooks can end up on any number of eReaders, you don’t know how the extra lines are going to work out for you. Instead, you should just leave extra lines out.
Usually if there are css instructions in the <head> section, you can take them out.
Thoughts on formatting a .doc file (for smashwords)
To make your life easier, you may want to attempt the following.
- Format your book in html. Make the formatting simple.
- Save a copy of your html file, but with a .doc extension.
- Open your new doc file in your word processor, make a change (add and erase a space or something.) and then save it.
The html file will have the crap screened out and Word and OpenOffice are smart enough to open a .htm file that has been renamed to .doc, but they will re save the file in the full .doc format.
Unless of course your original .doc already didn’t have any crazy formatting. If it already had minimal formatting, just upload it. No extra conversion crap necessary.
Thoughts on cover creation
Smashwords requires a at least a 900×600 image. Kindle wants one that is much bigger. From amazon’s help: “Image pixel dimensions of at least 1280 pixels on the longest side, 2560 or larger preferred.”
Cover page?
Don’t bother making it a separate page by adding in extra lines or anything. Just make it a section before the body of your text.
The book info section at the beginning of my book Oasis looks like this:
Oasis
by Bryce Beattie
Smashwords Edition
Published by Baby Katie Media, LLC at Smashwords
©2008 Bryce Beattie
Bountiful, Ut
http://www.StoryHack.comFor Aurora, who encourages me to write, even when it’s about zombies.
1: The Last Shift
I heard Donald running down the corridor calling my name, but I didn’t care. I just tightened the straps on my backpack kept walking toward the door. In fact, I sped up, hoping to get to the parking lot before he could…
For more information, check out:
- The Smashwords Style Guide – the official resource for what to do when formatting your book.
- Amazon’s Digital Text Publishing Forum
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