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.
Note: I just made this way easier. I built a simple piece of free software that does all this formatting work for you. Go check it out.
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) SmashWords
Smashwords distributes to the Sony eBook store, Barnes & Noble, the Kindle Store, and a bunch of other place.
Another way to build ebooks.
Horror author J. Dane Tyler has been kind enough to allow me to post his method for producing ebooks.
There are some more thoughts on self publishing an ebook here.