This is the sixth article in the series Publishing Your Own eBook series.
The document is now in its first draft and we have something tangible. Hopefully you are excited by the sweat and time you have put into this thing and the end is in sight. But before we get there, we have a bit of formatting and editing that needs to happen first. Today we will talk about how the eBook can/should look and tomorrow we will look at the editing process, but honestly, if we do it well, these two processes will actually run parallel to each other.
Here are some tips for you to make your eBook look EXCELLENT!
- Do What You Are Good At I will be making this same recommendation tomorrow, but unless you feel comfortable doing so, you might want to just seek someone out to help you put this together. Do you have the creativity, the software, and the time to put into it for a good design? If so, then press on. But if not, you might be able to find a graphic design intern at a local college to do it for cheap, someone online, or we might even be able to help if we have the time. Send a request through our Contact Us page.
- Be Original Do not go out to the local book store and rip something off. Use your own creativity to put this together. At the same time, use something other than Comic Sans for your cover page. Make it interesting and visually appealing. That might be the hook for several people to download or purchase your eBook and sets a quality level for your brand. Put the time into a great cover art that is both creative and correlates well with the topic of your eBook. In the same way, featured quotes within the chapter, section headings, and the overall feel should look more than a college paper that you wrote up in two hours for a class that you hate. Use stylistic fonts and colors everywhere.
- Do Not Forget… the table of contents, an about the writers section, headers and footers, any kind of copyright information, and further contact info for your brand or company. This is all important and if you are selling it, required. At the same time, make sure that everything is continuous. If you set your chapter heading as one font, do not make the next one different. Microsoft WORD has document themes, use them and customize them. Simply changing the font can get you into serious trouble if it looks wacky. But changing it via the theme will ensure that there is continuity.
- Let It Flow Well The eBook should have a natural flow to the document that makes the reader not have any trouble going from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Whitespace is your friend, but can be your biggest enemy. Let the margins be there, but not so much that the reader things you are cheating to make the whole thing longer. Do not add blank pages anywhere in it because it is distracting and a good reason for someone to stop reading. In essence, have a valid reason for what you do.
What kind of designs are you coming up with?
Rachel says
I’m curious: what program did you use to format your ebook? What would you recommend?
seventy8Productions says
For writing and formatting of the text, I simply used WORD 2011 and for the cover photo, Photoshop.
Rachel says
I’m experimenting a bit, because doing layout in Word drives me crazy (I know, I need the fruit of patience…a good way to practice!) For writing, I like Scrivener because of the full view mode where nothing distracts me and the options for chapters. I also like that I can keep my research and writings in one document. For layout/formatting I’m now using LaTex, but that’s because my husband is really good with it and he’s teaching me. It’s a lot of codes, but the upside is that you can get it exactly the way you want for little money as it’s free…
seventy8Productions says
LaTex is a great tool if you are comfortable using it. I have used it when writing reports about code or mathmatical formulas, but it is a lot of stuff to remember. Others have nothing but praise for Pages. Still others have a template setup with Adobe, though I do not know how to do that.