OK, I'll start things off. I had a pretty good week - sales picked up from the previous week, and my latest stories are doing pretty well.
The most important thing though is that yesterday I successfully hand-coded an ebook! Using the great guide "A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress" as well as Guido Henkel's guide, I was able to reformat an existing book, add in all the backmatter, convert it to an epub file, upload it to Amazon and test it out on my new Kindle - and it looks great! I strongly recommend both those guides to anyone who is thinking about starting hand coding. I was helped by the fact that I'm very computer savvy, but I think anyone could get the hang of it with some practice!
So this week the goal will be to reformat a bunch of my existing books, starting with the newest books and the top sellers. Extra smutbux, here I come!
That is part of the daunting set of first questions. My recommendation is that you drop $2.99 on this book. It will walk you through the whole book-creation process, including formatting, sizing, coding, etc.
Full disclosure: I did not write this book. But I use it every time I publish one. Like, every time. Mostly that's just because I'm a forgetful ass. But also because it's good.
Assuming you're publishing on amazon, the pages appear automatically on whatever device the person reads on. I'm not sure what the alternative would be? The only other thing I could think of is endless scrolling, which as far as I know amazon doesn't do.
Where the pages happen to end for the reader is going to be contingent on things like what font type the reader is choosing, what device they are reading on, etc etc.
The wall of text people are referring to is in reference to using paragraphs effectively, which while good advice, is a separate issue to formatting in page breaks.
I'm not nearly as knowledgable about formatting as other people on here, so I'm sure somebody can step in and correct me if any of my advice is off base. But no, I don't think you need to be adding in hand formatted page breaks in the main body of 4k word short, zon should take care of that automatically.
Tangentially related advice:, if you don't know about Kindle Create, it's a free and effective application that makes formatting shorts a breeze.
If you're interested in going the hand formatting route, Salacious Stories has an excellent guide on the matter
Congratulation on getting your first title out there! Welcome to the club
Read Salacious' book A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress for details.
But basically hand formatting is using HTML code (the same code used to design websites) to design and modify your text. Then you use programs to package the html file into an .epub, which can be published on Amazon in place of a Word document.
It's a little challenging to start if you have no experience with HTML (I didn't), but once you do it once it's pretty easy to replicate and ultimately is probably even easier than doing things with Word, at least imo.
You should totally read this book!. It's a quick, easy read and took a lot of the mystery out of it for me. :) Totally worth it. If you're enrolled in KU, there's no excuse cuz it's "free." And if not, then it's only $3.
I'm going to take a stab at it today and will let you know how it goes!
Yep. Calibre is what I use. Actually I use the process detailed in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC
I write my actual story in Scrivener, compile it into a Word document for editing, then use a program called Notepad ++ to format the text. After that I import it into Calibre. It sounds like a hard process but its really not that bad. The results are perfectly formatted ebooks. Formatting is important and bad formatting will get you bad reviews.
Hand-coding, from what I understand, gets the absolute best results. This book is supposed to be a great guide on how to do that.
Yo, check out Salacious's book from KU. A Filthy Book In A Fancy Dress.
There's a whole section in there on hand coding. Takes a bit to learn. I'm not claiming to like hand coding at all, but that book makes it a ton easier.
If you haven't read this yet, perhaps this is a good time to point out that Salicious's KENPC 2.0 went up.
Here's a link to the book I wrote on the subject. It holds your hand pretty well as you build your templates, but if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line.
>When you say "book cover only", it means I can't put the picture on the inside of the book, and when you say "in conjunction with text", it means inside of the book instead of the cover, right?
Exactly!
And cost isn't really that big a deal. I use a TON of images in this book, and the delivery cost is only $.12, which granted, is like three times the size of my text-only books. But if you have an audience who you think would buy a bunch, the delivery cost isn't really a detriment. You just have to make sure the images are properly sized and compressed.
If you're hand formatting, you can set your type using CSS and then just let the reader decide on the ultimate size of the text. It also avoids lots of other formatting pitfalls. I wrote a guide for hand formatting and rapid-workflow smut-slinging. Maybe you'd find it useful?
There's a couple different routes you could go.
I've not used it myself, but Vellum is spoken of as the one of the nicest options. It's also quite pricey, but you could easily pay somebody to format it for you if you don't want to shell out the hundred or so bucks to have the program yourself.
Scrivener is another app that is spoken of highly. I've used neither of them personally, so take that with a grain of salt.
You could hand format it. Salacious Stories made a guide for erotica shorts, but I would imagine it would work for novels. It has the added advantage of Sal being a moderator on here who chooses to spend his free time being super goddamn helpful, and so if you have questions you can ask him directly.
The easiest route would be downloading it as a docx, ands chucking that into Kindle Create.
I'm not a formatting guru (though there are quite a few who hang out here), so I can only be of limited help, but that's the advice I'm capable of giving.
Congrats on getting your first novel done! Here's a celebratory tune I wrote just for you.
♪ Those smutbux will be coming round the mountain when they coooome ♪
♪ Those smutbux with be coming round the mountain when they coooome ♪
♪ Well enough with the chatter ♪
♪ Give me my happily ever after! ♪
♪ Those smutbux will be coming when they cooooooome ♪ ♪
It's super easy to learn, honestly I would recommend anyone who self publishes to learn this part of the process because it is best to have fine control of it.
So learn up on some basic CSS, read this book but instead of doing all the stuff she says about formatting the text in word (search and replace), copy and paste your word document into this tool and let it do allll the work for you.
Otherwise, play with different CSS on your title pages (look at other authors for ideas), learn to embed custom fonts (fancy), and learn how to code a TOC from scratch (not hard! it's basic css).
I use Sigil personally because it gives me fine control of everything. You can use Calibre as she instructs, but Sigil is XHTML and will get pissed off if you screw anything up so it's a bit safer to me.
Why hand formatting instead of just grabbing Vellum and formatting for people? Vellum doesn't teach you shit, and you'll give people a better KENP by doing handformatting. You can do all that fancy Vellum shit with handformatting, and you can squeeze more pages out of it which is what everyone wants. How many more pages?
Some more schmuck uploaded this long ass story from a word document to Amazon and got 200 pages out of it. Using proper formatting, it went to 600+ pages. That is an uncommon example, but handformatting is nearly always better.
> Anyone have tips for formatting?
Oh boy do I! Honestly, for the first few months of shorts, I just did things on Google docs then uploaded a docx file to Amazon. That worked fine and looked okay and let me focus on what was important: writing more shorts.
If you want to get fancy there's a bunch of way to go: you can use Scrivener, apparently, as you're doing. If you have a Mac and want them to look really pretty you can get a program called Vellum (there are ways to get it on your PC, too, by simulating a Mac, if you really want Vellum). The two programs I've heard mentioned for Windows (or Mac) are Jutoh and Sigil.
Finally, if you want to invest a fair amount of time learning stuff, don't get frustrated very easily, and want complete control over your books, you can do something called hand formatting. That's where you go in and use HTML to make your manuscript look nice. I just learned how to do this and find it quiet satisfying. Check out <em>A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress</em> by Cooper Kegel and <em>Zen of eBook Formatting</em> by Guido Henkel. Henkel also has a series of blog posts if you want a quick overview of what you're getting into. Both of the books are free to read with Kindle Unlimited though, I believe, and you can get a free month of KU if you're not already signed up. It's quite useful for doing market research anyway.
But, anyway, if your just getting started I'd say: just make it look nice in a Word doc and upload that.
P.S. I don't really know what I'm talking about. Just repeating what I've learned so far.
If you really want total customization and control + for free + being able to make adjustments anytime you want, the solution might be learning how to format using HTML. All ebooks are HTML codes at their core, so Atticus/Vellum/etc are basically apps that make the coding for you. If you code it yourself, you'll spend your time instead of money, but it's pretty gratifying!
In case you're unfamiliar with HTML, Reddit (up until a couple of years ago) and Goodreads post formatting are basically HTML.
Your 1st book will take the most time to format this way, but once you get the hang of it, you can format future books in 1 hour (or be like me that tries to add new fluff every time, breaks the code, and then spend 2 days fiddling with it until it works). All you'll need is Notepad++ (free program) to write your code and Calibre that will compile it into .epub (I know Calibre is flawed when converting .doc to .epub, but that's because it has to read and untangle Word's own messy built-in HTML. When you provide your own HTML, it's much cleaner, so Calibre does a good job).
Free guide by Guido Henkel (it's super complete but a bit information-intensive): https://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-pride-in-your-ebook-formatting/
Paid guide (well, it's only $2.99. Nothing compared to Atticus) that is much easier to digest. The code it teaches will create a very basic layout, but I think it's better to learn and get the gist of it. It's also the only one who teaches useful macros that automate some codes that will save you (a lot of) time later on. After reading it, Guido Henkel's guide becomes easier to understand (and you'll need his guide for the complex bells and whistles).
And then there's the paid guide from Guido. It's $5.99 but it's very similar to what his free guide teaches (content-wise). In the end, I bought it for a paragraph's worth of very specific instructions for the most superfluous piece of formatting that I reeeeally wanted to learn.
Caveat: Atticus/Vellum will convert your formatting to ebook and paperback. Coding in HTML will give you only an ebook, and then you'll have to use Word to create your paperback. Tbh, I could do everything I wanted with Word just by following KDP's free guide, so I never felt the need to buy a different program to make paperbacks.
Just read this book and you will be illuminated.
edit: I did not write this book, but I am a shameless shill for our very own /u/salaciousstories.
> A Filthy Book In a Fancy Dress, will help you format your ebooks and make them more appealing: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC
I'm planning on buying Vellum before my next book, and I'm hoping that will take care of formatting for me. Maybe wistful thinking...
> https://www.amazon.com/Naughty-Ink-Erotica-Publish-Successful-ebook/dp/B00L8ERJVU
I'll read through this. I'm only in Amazon, so some of the information might not be relevant, but I always find a few gems of info. Great that it's in KU!
Thanks for the links.
For me coding is less hard than forcing myself to do a boring thing lots of times! The process goes like this:
1.) Google something like what I want to do. (Hope someone already did something similar.)
2.) Copy it. Make the changes to apply to my particular situation.
3.) It does something. Not what I wanted it to do. Cry. Swear.
4.) Google something slightly different and splice in the new information.
5.) Does it work? If so, yay! If not, go to 3. Repeat until forever.
Here's the little bit I stared at for 30 minutes until I figured out what I was doing wrong (and therefore what was right):
line = re.sub(r'<p>','<p class=first>',line) line = line.replace('</span>','') splitstring = line.partition('<span>') line = splitstring[0] + '<span class=fletter>' + splitstring[2][0] + '</span>' + splitstring[2][1:]
which basically takes a line of the document which is encased in <p><span>[words]</span></p> tags and moves the span with my first letter class around the first letter.
It is simple and silly and dumb and I yelled at it and I sent my partner angry unicorn .gifs about it and when it worked at last I got up out of my chair and did a small dance in the middle of the room.
Hat tip to "Zen of Ebook Formatting" and "A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress", the latter of which I can never ever search for ("A Naughty Book in a Pretty Dress"? "A Dirty Book in a Classy Dress"? "A Slutty Book in a Lovely Dress"?) and end up searching for BOOK DRESS FORMATTING DAMMIT until I find it.
https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC
https://www.amazon.com/Zen-eBook-Formatting-Step-step-ebook/dp/B00KJAH4HS/
EDIT: to add a closed paren. you might think I would be on the lookout for that stuff after coding all day but APPARENTLY NOT
I do hand-formatting in pretty much the same way you do (and thanks for the shout-out for A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress, /u/ElannaReese—even I can't remember the title sometimes).
At the most basic,all ebooks are a collection of HTML files (or a single HTML file) organized with an XML file, plus a handful of controller files that inform devices how to interact with the code. Usually, the XML is generated when we use software like Calibre or Kindlegen to build EPUB or MOBI files, respectively.
You can add further bells and whistles with the addition of images and embedded fonts, and create a book that looks exactly the way you want it to look via a CSS stylesheet. If you go this route, you'll have to create a template file structure for all of your books, but once it's ready, you'll be able to quickly and easily format your books. I use a folder, which is named with the title of my book, and then inside that folder I have the HTML file for the manuscript, a folder each for images and fonts, and the stylesheet I use for all of my books. When you're ready, you zip the contents of the book folder together and convert it to an EPUB. That's the basics of hand-formatting. It sounds complicated, but once you try it a couple of times, it's really super simple, and it teaches you a valuable skill to boot.
Vellum is a great piece of software and you can definitely install it on a virtual machine to run it on Windows. It's somewhat limited in terms of options, but produces lovely books with a KENPC that is bested only by hand-formatting. You can also always reformat your books via Vellum (or any other method) and overwrite the original at any time.
If you're looking to build a TOC, here's a really basic example:
HTML
For the TOC itself:
<h2 id="toc" class="center break ncx">Contents</h2>
<p> class="contents"><a href="#chp1">Chapter One</a></p>
And then anything you want to link the TOC to:
<h2 id="chp1" class="center break ncx">Chapter One</h2>
I use the "ncx" class to tell Calibre which elements I want to include in the NCX file (which is the device-specific "virtual" table of contents that lets people use their device to navigate the book).
The link generated in your TOC by <a href="#chp1">Chapter One</a> is called an anchor, and will link to the "id" value listed. So for the example, it'll link to the "id" of "chp1", which is where chapter one begins. If you wanted to make a link to your back matter, it'd look like this in the TOC:
<p> class="contents"><a href="#backmatter">About the Author</a></p>
And like this in the book:
<h2 id="backmatter" class="center break ncx">About the Author</h2>
CSS
#toc{
border-bottom: 2px solid #000;
margin-bottom: 1em;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-weight: normal;
font-size: 1.25em;
}
.break {
page-break-before:always;
}
.center{
text-align:center;
}
.contents a{
font-size: 90%;
text-indent: 0;
border-bottom: 1px solid rgb (157, 157, 172);
}
If you have any questions or anything, feel free to drop me a line. Good luck!
http://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC
Hand-formatting guide for Kindle (and every other format)
Oh, don't need a refund--just tried a sample. You can see the problems if you look at the Amazon preview. Here's a book all about formatting.