So I have been re-formatting a couple of my books over the last week because I am changing the cover and took the opportunity to give them another going over. You never know if there might be something you can improve after all :). I've also imported them all into yWriter so I now have a single point master text.
While doing this there were a couple of things I discovered that are not in my post Checklist for Creating the eBook from Your Beautifully Edited Novel so I decided to make a post about them today.
Extra Tips I Learned When Reformatting Two of My eBooks
| Wittegen Press |
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| $6.79 | £5.69 Amazon | Other |
- When exporting from yWriter, RTF is the best format and most useful output. Plain text puts unwanted tags in the output and I don't want the HTML yet.
- Always copy and paste the content of the RTF file into a text editor (I recommend PSPad) before opening a clean document with the template you usually use for formatting your eBook documents and copy and pasting the clean text from the text editor. Converting the RTF file in Word can have a weird effect on your styles so it's best to start from just plain text.
- Do the Kindle Word document first because it uses the inbuilt table of contents.
- To do the Smashwords version of the file:
- copy the Kindle version of the file
- Change the one page in your front matter that is Kindle specific to be Smashwords specific.
- Copy and paste the table of contents into a text program (Notepad or PSPad)
- Delete the page numbers after every chapter entry
- Delete the table of contents in the Word Document
- Copy and paste the table of contents entries from the text program and now you don't have to type out all your chapter headings again.
- Now just follow the instructions in the Smashwords Style Guide to link up the table of contents and your chapter headings before checking for excess bookmarks.
Hope this is useful to someone :). They are just a few things I realised as I went along, that save time, and we can all do with more of that. Everything else I did was the same as the previous blog post tips.
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Since I handcode my ebooks for Amazon, I prefer to format in word for Smashwords, and then take that and insert the HTML into word before copy/paste into notepad. I find it an easier process that way.
ReplyDeleteI used to do that, but then Amazon started to recommend using Word and their conversion seems to work really well - at least for my books. I suspect if you want anything more complicated in layout, it might not be quite so useful, however.
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