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. Different ebook distributers require different formats.
1) Print Ready PDF (CreateSpace)
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) Kindle Store eBooks
If you publish directly to the Kindle eBook store, you can use a zipped html file.
- eBook Prearation for the Kindle Store <- my tutorial, using zipped html files.
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)
There are some more thoughts on self publishing an ebook here.