In the last episode of Adventures with Smashwords, I created a publisher account at Smashwords.com for our publishing company Logical Expressions. Since then, I've been preparing the first e-book we are publishing through Smashwords: Susan Daffron's Funds to the Rescue.
Don't worry, I won't give a blow-by-blow on what I went through to get good looking e-book output; suffice it to say that it took 10-12 hours of formatting work in Word and 5 revisions. However, I feel confident that the next book will go much faster, given what I learned this time, which is what I'll share with you now.
The Starting Point
When you upload your work to Smashwords, the file must be in Microsoft Word document (.doc) format. Having a consistent starting point makes it easier for Smashwords to automate the conversion process that produces the various e-book document formats. Many authors create their manuscript in Microsoft Word, so getting their book into that format is not an issue.
However, if you've had your book professionally edited (and you should) and/or you've had the book's interior layout professionally designed (and you should), there's a good chance the original Word manuscript is no longer the "latest and greatest" version of your book. Such was the case with Funds to the Rescue.
Susan imports her manuscript into Adobe InDesign to perform interior layout work. In the course of laying out the book, she always find things that need to be tweaked in the original content, so the InDesign version becomes the new "book of record."
To produce a Word document she could hand over to me, Susan exported the book from InDesign to Rich Text Format (.rtf), which is the next best thing to a .doc file. If you used Word styles in your original manuscript, InDesign recognizes and uses them, and when you export to RTF, they carry through to the exported file. As you'll see, that's both a blessing and a curse.
E-Book Layout Requirements
First, understand that the layout requirements for an e-book are completely different from a print book. Most e-book formats allow text to "flow" according to the size of the screen used to view them. Additionally, most e-book reading devices ("e-readers") are very limited in what fonts they can display, or they even let the user choose what font they want to see. Finally, e-readers are typically low-resolution, so those high-resolution images you created for the print version of your book aren't going to work well.
Compared to print, e-book publishers lose a lot of control over how the book appears to the end user. In fact, I've often heard complaints about how most e-books look really bad, and it's true. Getting e-books to look good requires effort, knowledge, and patience. I'll do what I can to help you with the knowledge part.
The Smashwords Style Guide
If you are going to publish an e-book through Smashwords, the first thing you should do is download the Smashwords Style Guide by Mark Coker (it costs nothing) and read through it entirely. When you are done, read through it again. The style guide will save you hours of wasted time trying to get your book processed through the Smashwords "Meatgrinder."
I can summarize the most important lesson from the style guide right here: don't get fancy.
The guide covers most of what you need to know, but it left a few questions unanswered for me, so I'll share my findings as well.
The Secret of Good E-Book Layout
To create an e-book that looks good in multiple formats, you need to take into consideration the limitations of the e-readers and the formats themselves. Unfortunately, since you get only one input file to create multiple output formats, you are stuck in "least common denominator" land. In other words, a limitation in one format or reader may affect what you can do with all the others.
For a straight narrative fiction book, the limitations are easy to work around, but for non-fiction books with multiple heading levels and images or drawings, the limitations can drive you crazy. Naturally, Funds to the Rescue had all of those features.
In theory, an EPUB or MOBI e-book should be highly flexible. Both formats are based on the Open Packaging Format (OPF), which consists of XHTML, style sheets, and XML files that define the document structure. If that sounds familiar, it should: XHTML and style sheets are the basic elements of a modern Web site. You should be able to style a book as richly as you can a Web page.
As the saying goes, "in theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice, they aren't." For EPUB and MOBI, the limiting factor becomes the e-reader. Unlike Web browsers, e-readers do not yet conform to standards that result in consistent reading experiences. For example, some reading devices allow the user to control what font is used, or the reader may display everything with its own font, regardless of what the e-book layout specifies.
To top it all off, the Smashwords Meatgrinder has its own idiosyncrasies in how it translates your Word document into the various formats. In fact, three of my five passes through the Meatgrinder with Funds to the Rescue were specifically to iron out translation discrepancies between the resulting formats.
You might be wondering why you would want to bother using Smashwords at all if it is such a pain to get good results. The answer is because it is an even bigger pain to generate all of the individual formats yourself, and when you are done, you won't have the distribution advantages that come with publishing through Smashwords.
If you follow the Smashwords Style Guide and my recommendations here, you have a good chance of getting decent results quickly.
Formatting Recommendations for Non-Fiction
Publishing Funds to the Rescue taught me a lot about what works and what doesn't when it comes to publishing a non-fiction e-book through Smashwords. Here are a few of the things I learned:
- Keep it simple. Use just a few heading levels (more than three is probably too many), and as few images as possible.
- In general, avoid using built-in Word styles except Normal, with exceptions noted below.
- The built-in Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 styles may cause a "page break" in certain readers. (You can end up with pages that have nothing but the heading on them.) Use Heading 1 in specific locations where starting a new page would be welcome, but use your own styles based on Normal for other Heading 1's, and for your Heading 2 and Heading 3.
- It is okay to use Word page breaks (inserted with the Ctrl-Enter keystroke) in the file. They work nicely in the PDF version.
- Use your own styles to handle even minor variations in paragraph formatting. For example, it is common to set the Normal paragraph style to have an indent, but for the first paragraph after a heading to not be indented. Set up a "Normal NoIndent" style for those paragraphs. If you just apply local formatting, it will be ignored in the MOBI format (font settings are respected, but paragraph settings are not). The same thing goes for centered text: create a "Normal Centered" style.
- Create and use low-resolution versions of your images. The width should not exceed 600, but do feel free to make them wide, otherwise they may get stretched and pixelated in some e-readers. E-readers may also shrink them, but that doesn't usually cause as many problems.
- Put images "in line" with the text. In other words, don't try to wrap text around them because that won't work in some readers anyway.
- Decide which format you care about the most. I didn't run into many "formatting paradoxes" (where what works well in one format causes problems in another), but when you do find them, you have to make a command decision about what format is most important to you. I chose EPUB.
- Avoid using bullet list styles. Actually, your mileage varies on this one. Some e-readers may render the resulting e-book fine and others not. Adobe Digital Editions was apparently confused by the fact that the generated list item tags contained paragraphs (e.g. "<li><p>like this</p></li>"), so I got no bullets. You can use an asterisk (or some other character) followed by a space as a bullet instead.
- Minimize the use of fonts. I used Times New Roman for the body text and Arial for the headings. Those selections worked well across all formats.
- Set the Word document properties! This one drove me nuts for a while. It appears that the MOBI format gets the book title and the author name from inside the Word document, not from the metadata you set up in Smashwords. Open the file properties dialog in Word and set the Title and Author items. If you don't the book title will come out as something long and unintelligible, and the author name might actually be wrong (as it was in my case).
- Put your book cover inside the document. That way your customers see the cover in all formats. The style guide recommends 600 x 900, which looks good on most readers. The Funds to the Rescue cover is 530 x 800, which allows some room for margins on the e-reader. In some readers, the cover will show up twice, but that's better than not at all.
- Replace drop-caps with a larger, bold letter. This recommendation is straight out of the style guide, but I mention it here because I used the technique and it worked well for me.
- Use line breaks to collapse line spacing. Sometimes you want to break text across multiple lines, but you don't want them to get the line spacing of a normal paragraph. The testimonial attributions in Funds to the Rescue were like that. In Word, you use the shift-enter keystroke to insert a line break instead of a paragraph break. Not all formats and e-readers support this trick, but it is nice in the ones that do, and it doesn't seem to hurt anything in the ones that don't.
In the end, here are the style definitions I ended up using in my Word document:
- Normal: Times New Roman, 12pt, Indent first line .25", left, single spacing
- Normal NoIndent: Normal + Indent first line 0"
- Normal Centered: Normal + Indent first line 0", centered
- Heading 1: Normal + Arial, 16pt bold, Indent first line 0", centered, level 1
- LE Heading 1: Normal + Arial, 16pt bold, Indent first line 0", centered
- LE Heading 2: Normal + Arial, 14pt bold, Indent first line 0", centered
- LE Heading 3: Normal + Arial, 12pt bold, Indent first line 0"
The heading styles with an "LE" (Logical Expressions) prefix are just replacements for the built-in styles of the same name (which have the page break problem I mentioned).
Table of Contents
I've seen the argument that the search feature that comes with most e-readers makes a table of contents and index superfluous. I agree with that regarding indexes for the most part, but no so much with a table of contents. I believe that certain non-fiction books benefit from a table of contents that lets you jump directly to specific sections of the document.
Support for a table of contents varies by e-book format and e-reader. For example, the MOBI format does not provide for a table of contents, but EPUB does. If your EPUB book contains a table of contents, the Adobe Digital Editions e-reader gives you a nice set of links to the left of the reading pane for navigating quickly around the book. Other e-readers may do it differently or not at all.
However, most formats do support hyperlinks (both internal - within the document, and external - to pages on the Web). You can use hyperlinks to build a functional table of contents section within your e-book. I can report that this approach works well in MOBI, EPUB, and PDF.
The Smashwords Style Guide includes good instructions for how to set up a linked table of contents using Word bookmarks and hyperlinks. I won't repeat that information here, but I will add some insight I gained for generating EPUB table of contents entries (which you'd only see in an e-reader like Adobe Digital Editions):
- The EPUB table of contents entries generated by the Smashwords Meatgrinder are ordered by the location of the first link to a bookmark, not by the order of the bookmarks themselves. You can avoid ordering problems by making sure the links in your Table of Contents section precede any other links between sections in the book. In other words, don't link to the last section of the book from the front matter, or that last section will show up first in the table of contents list! Yes, I learned that the hard way.
- You probably want your Table of Contents section itself to show up as an entry. To do that, make the first item in the table of contents a "Contents" link that links to the table of contents section heading. Yes, it looks funny to have Contents be the first item in the Contents section (seems redundant), but it makes that link the first one in the generated table of contents.
- The text of the EPUB contents entry comes from the linked text, not the bookmarked text.
Upload Your Book
Once you have your e-book document ready to roll, log in to Smashwords and upload it. You'll need to provide the cover image and manuscript files as well as "metadata" about your book. Here's what you need to prepare:
- Title
- Synopsis (400 chars max)
- Language
- Adult Content (yes/no)
- Pricing
- Sampling (how much of the book can be previewed for fr*e)
- Categories
- Tags (important!)
- Formats you want to offer (EPUB, MOBI, etc)
- Cover image file (min height 600px)
- Manuscript file (5MB max size)
- Accept the publishing agreement (read it!)
- Author
After you upload your book, it will be placed in a Meatgrinder processing queue. Your wait time will vary dramatically. I've been first in line and gotten my book converted within a minute or so, and I've been placed at #215 in the queue and had to wait 2.5 hours.
Test Your Output
After conversion, Smashwords gives your new e-book its own Smashwords Web page. You can visit that page and download your files to see how they turned out. If you are unhappy with the results of the conversion, you can "unpublish" the book to hide it from the public until you generate a version you like. When you are happy, you can "republish" the book from the Smashwords dashboard.
To test the various formats, you need e-readers. If you don't own an e-reading device yourself, you can download no-cost software programs and preview the files on your computer. Here are some of the ones I use (you can find others by searching the Internet):
Forget about Perfection
The Smashwords Style Guide and the information I've presented here should help you produce a nice looking e-book. But it won't look like your print book, and it won't look perfect in every e-reader.
For example, one "formatting paradox" I had to just live with was the fact that the Smashwords HTML reader incorrectly displays my "Normal NoIndent" and "Normal Centered" styles. It displays them in the wrong font for some reason. I chose to ignore that problem because removing the styles and using local formatting didn't work in MOBI, which I view as more important.
The problem is that you have many points of failure. The Smashwords Meatgrinder interprets the Word document in a specific way to produce the output. The e-book file format has its own limitations and idiosyncrasies. Finally, every e-reader travels to the beat of its own drum when interpreting the e-book file.
Some day, we may see better standardization of file formats and readers, but the e-book market is still just developing, so don't hold your breath for consistency just yet.
P.S. If you would like to see the fruits of my labor, you can view the first 10% of the book at no charge on the Funds to the Rescue Smashwords page. You'll be able to see what I mean about the font errors in their HTML viewer.