Please Format Your Ebook Correctly!

One of my pet peeves when reading a book on my Kindle is finding that the chapter hyperlinks do not exist or work properly. Worse, I often find that books don’t have a working link to their Table of Contents and have blank pages where none are needed. Then there are the truly regrettable offerings that have poor paragraph spacing, odd font changes, or incorrect typographical characters.

Formatting an ebook is not hard. Yes it takes time. Yes it can be frustrating when, as an author, you realize that you have to learn yet another skill-set in order to self-publish your work. News flash: self-publishing means doing, by yourself, all the work of a publisher. Traditional publishers pay editors, copy-editors, marketing professionals, cover artists, and ebook formatters out of that huge chunk they take from your royalties. You can either pay people to do all of those tasks for you, or learn how to do them all yourself. Actually, scratch that. DON’T edit your own work, or proofread it, or do your own cover art (unless you are also a gifted artist). Ebook formatting, however, you CAN do by yourself.

I did it, and here’s how:

Go to this link (don’t worry it opens in another window) and read Guido Henkel’s excellent nine part series on how to format an ebook. Yes, I said nine parts. Take an hour of your day and read what he wrote, in its entirety. Then, read it again and take notes. This is not hard material. If you can put together adjectives, nouns, and verbs and take a reader of those words to another time or place, then you can string together an html search string.

Mr. Henkel uses a program called TextMate to edit his html document. He also mentions a program called Jedit. I tried Jedit and it made my head hurt. I have the great honor to be friends with a brilliant computer nerd. I asked her what I should use for html editing, and then cried (through text messaging) until she agreed to help me through the process. (You can find Mrs. Maples information on the “Links” page of my webpage. If all of this gets too overwhelming, send her an email. She might take pity on you, for a price.) On her recommendation, I now use an html editor called Html-Kit.

Now that you’ve read through Henkel’s nine part saga, flipped out, calmed down, downloaded a text editor, griped about all the damn trouble you’re going through, and calmed the frack down—again--, follow Henkel’s instructions starting in Part VI.

Yes this process will take time. I had expert help and it still took me the better part of two days to correctly format a .mobi and .epub version of my book. Please, though, don’t wimp out, give up, and just throw up a word document onto Kindle Direct Publishing. You are doing yourself and your potential readers a huge disservice.

If you get stuck, send me a note through my “Request Information” form, on Twitter, or on Facebook. Friends don’t let friends publish broken ebooks.