You should prepare your work to be published in print form and in eBook form. For print, you’ll need an appropriately sized and formatted pdf. For ebooks, you will most likely need a simple html or rtf file, depending on where you’re publishing the ebook. This section will help you prepare all of these files.
1) Print Ready PDF
I’ve seen people charge $5 – $10 per page to layout the text in your novel. That seems very pricey to me.
The good news is that the freely available OpenOffice.org makes things really easy to create a professional quality layout.
If you’re not too interested in learning the guts of how to use OpenOffice to customize your book layout, just cruise on over to the downloads page and check out the OpenOffice.org templates. Here’s how to use the openoffice templates.
If you’re more of a do-it-yourselfer, I made some videos to walk you through laying out your text in openoffice.
Layout Your Book’s Text In OpenOffice
2) html File
Most places that allow you to self-publish an eBook either import an html directly, or provide a piece of software that takes an html file, chews it up, and spits out a file that can be uploaded. This is usually pretty easy, and someday I’ll provide a full tutorial for doing it. For now, just look for an option called ‘export’ or a way to select ‘html file’ in the filetype box after you choose “Save As”.
You start with an html file when you publish for the kindle, or on mobipocket.com.
3) rtf file
You start with an rtf file when you want to publish an ebook on smashwords. (which then can get the ebook distributed to Barnes and Noble)