#WWoW!: Formatting Ebooks with @dochappycamper #indie #MyWANA

Welcome back to Tammy's Tidbits here at Writer's Words of Wisdom. This is going to be my last post of the year because of all the holidays...and my birthday in less than two weeks. (whoohoo!) I'm also in the middle of a hefty publication schedule. As the co-owner of Sassy Vixen Publishing, it's not only my responsibility to get my own books ready to publish, but those of our other authors as well. With one new release down and two more to go for the next month, my plate is a bit full. 

I'm now published under three pen names, a fourth in the wings and part of an anthology with three of my author friends. In fact, the anthology comes out in just nine days. I've been working on formatting five novellas into one file to upload to Smashwords, All Romance Ebooks and Amazon. It's not as easy as just uploading a Word file to each site and hope for the best. You see, there are a lot of things that are hidden in the code of Microsoft Word that will make an ebook a mess of errors on an ereader.

So how do you prevent it from happening? 

You could have someone format it for you. That could cost you a pretty penny and if you're just starting out like I was, you need to watch the budget. Unless you have a friend or family member who has published ebooks before...and they look fabulous on those little screens, you need to learn how to do this yourself and fast.

How?  The Smashwords Style Guide.

I know what you're thinking. Why would you use the guide to publish on Smashwords to create files for other sites? Easy. This book has detailed instructions on how to make a file that is stripped of all the hidden codes, lines, tab settings, indents etc that can make your ebook look ugly and jarring to the reader. If your manuscript makes it through the Smashwords "Meatgrinder" you can be darn sure it will make it through the other site

One of the biggest issues I've come across in the ebooks I've read for pleasure and to review inappropriate set up of a paragraph. If you use the built in tab settings to do indents or Goddess forbid, multiple spaces to get an indent, your ebook will have paragraphs that start in the middle or two thirds into the line. If your manuscript is more than single spaced, your ebook will have huge gaps between lines and look bizarre on those ereader screens.

The Style Guide walks you through each step on how to set up your paragraph so that every indent will be the same as well as the justification to the left or whatever you choose. Here's a few screen shots of what I mean. Now these are not in the guide, but are from a tutorial on how to use Microsoft Word. Similar pics are in the Guide and you can refer to them over and over again when you format your books.

I set up my paragraphs to have a first line indent of 0.3", single spaced and left justified. All the margins I set to 0 inches. This is my basic set up for any of my manuscripts for self publishing. Now if you're submitting your manuscript to a publisher, you have to follow their guidelines. You can do that here too. 

The above is a close up of the window you use to set up the indents. All of these pointers and more are in the Style Guide.

Best thing about it...it's FREE.

That's right. This guide is FREE. You can download it from Amazon or from Smashwords right to your Kindle and have it to refer to every single time you need it. The goal of the guide is to help you create a beautiful looking ebook...one that shows up on all the electronic reading devices.

In this day and age where anyone and their brother can publish a book on their own, we have to do something to make our work stand out in a good way. Self published authors already have a bad reputation for having poorly edited and formatted books out there. Why not make sure yours isn't one of them? 

Join me and many others out there who swear by this guide and the methods detailed inside. Help me give self published authors a better name and put our best foot out there. No longer will reviewers and readers have the excuse to slam us and treat us as if we're inferior because our ebooks look like landmines filled with formatting errors.

One final note: if you do have someone else format your book for you, make sure you review it on the various ereaders. You can download free versions of all of them from the web. Just because your book looks good in print or in .doc file, doesn't mean it will look the same in EPUB, MOBI, PDF or HTML.

Food for thought! 
Until next time,
~Tammy

Learn More About Tammy

Tammy Dennings Maggy is a best selling, multi-published poet and erotic romance author with Siren and Sassy Vixen Publishing. Her writing explores many facets of romance from ultimate betrayal to finding your soul mate. Her poetry serves as a companion to her novels and has inspired entire series all on their own. Tammy and her alter egos Lia Michaels and Stephanie Ryan make up the core authors at Sassy Vixen Publishing and together they've created the shared world series Temptations Resort. Look for the first books in that series to come out later this year.

Now happily married to her own Muse and soul mate, she continues to live her dream and act as secretary to all her characters demanding to have their stories told.

Check out:

Tammy's Website
Tammy's Blog
Tammy's Books on Bookstrand, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords,  and iTunes 
Sassy Vixen Publishing
Friend Tammy on Facebook
Like Tammy's Facebook Author Page
Friend Tammy on Goodreads
Friend Tammy on Pinterest
Follow Tammy on Twitter
Find Tammy's Videos on Youtube


If you'd like to share your experiences in the publishing world, please contact us about setting up a guest appearance. We'd love to hear from you!

#WWoW! Getting Organized with #Scrivener

Hello new visitors and returning readers! Welcome to Tammy's Tidbits on Writer's Words of Wisdom.  Each week four participating authors write about a variety of topics that center around our journey through the world of publishing. From writing, blogging, editing, critique partners, social media and more, we've got takes on everything. 

While sometimes we may discuss the same topics, we do so with different perspectives. All of it's done in order to share what's worked—and not worked for us along the way. If you'd like share your Words of Wisdom, we have Fridays open. Let us know and we'll get you scheduled.

The following post was originally done just before I released my vampire inspired poetry book, The Courtship of the Vampyre. This post is a step by step description of my experience using Scrivener to organize my work. I'm telling you, the program saved my backside on numerous occasions by helping me keep everything at my fingertips. Recently, I've used the split screen feature to help with edits of The Surrender of Julia(Now and Forever 3).  

More on that in the coming weeks. For now, here's my introduction to the wonderful world of...

My post today's about a writing program called Scrivener. I was reluctant to try this even after all the rave reviews by fellow author friends. I mean, I had a system that seemed to be working for me and I didn't want to mess with it. That is, until I ended up adding more projects to my "To Do" lists for all three of my pen names. The number of paper notebooks I was hauling around with me at any given time was beginning to weigh me down—literally!

The program for Windows (and Mac) was readily available through Amazon for $40. I figured , "What the hell?" I had a credit from Thank You Points left over from another purchase, so I wasn't out any extra money. So with the click of my mouse I bought the program.  The download was easy and painless as was registering the product with the Scrivener site.

So what now?

With most new "toys" I tend to just open it up and figure it all out as I go, but this looked too damn daunting. To get a bit more help, I went back to Amazon and found a few books that would help me with creating an ebook using the program and of course I had the help that came along with the program itself. Not only did it come with a manual within the program, it also had a tutorial. Hmmmm...this was going to be a first for me, actually watching the tutorial!

Trust me, no one was more shocked than I was that I started up the program to get my initial bearings.  I was so glad I did! It takes you through each section with ease and in language that's easy to understand. Not only do you learn each step, but you learn different routes in the program to achieve the same goals. It's all about tailoring the experience to fit your own needs.

The tutorial explains how each level works from draft, to folders, text files and research files. I can even store the photos that inspire my characters so I can pull them up while writing the scenes. How cool is that?  I found out that I can create multiple levels for each project (chapters and scenes for example) or just keep it straight forward like having each folder/chapter one separate poem. By setting it up that way, I can be sure each poem starts on it's own page like a chapter would.

example of cork board view

My favorite part so far is the cork board view. With my vampire poetry project, I have all the poems/folders laid out on "index" cards. I can then write a short synopsis on each card so I'll be reminded what is covered in that poem without having to open the folder to read it.

The best part? I can shuffle every card in whatever order I want! No more cut, past and then delete like when I worked with just Microsoft Word. If I don't like the order, I can just move the cards around and then flip back to the document view and see all the poems laid out with page breaks. This helps me to visualize what the ebook will look like once it's all finalized. I haven't got to the compiling part yet where I convert all of my "chapters" into an ebook, so I'll leave that discussion for next week.

I'm at the point where I have my cover, nearly all the poems in the order I want them in, my copyright page, dedication and acknowledgement page, table of contents with links to find each poem within the document and my "about the author" section. I've even made separate folders for Kindle, Smashwords and Createspace copyright pages. You see, when it comes to the compiling phase, I only have to choose the appropriate folders/chapters to combine into the final product.

So far, so good! Next is to compile everything and make the different formats needed for Smashwords and Kindle. This is the key reason I purchased this program so that it will be easier to format all the different files for each publishing route. Unfortunately, I had a bit of trouble with compiling into different formats. I'm not sure if I wasn't following directions properly but the files just wouldn't convert. Of course I got fabulous .doc files. Both Smashwords and Amazon require this file type so I'm not flipping out yet. LOL!

Instead of fretting over my issues with this phase, I found another program to help me out. In Word, I saved my .doc file as a PDF.  Using this format in Calibre, I converted it to all ebook formats I'd need for uploading to All Romance ebooks, Omnilit and for sale on my own website eventually.  Calibre is a free program that helps with ebook file conversion and organization of your library. It's fun! More about that next week!


Have you used Scrivener or another program like it? Let me know what you think. I'd love to hear from you.

Until next week!
~Tammy

Learn More About Tammy

Tammy Dennings Maggy is a best selling, multi-published poet and erotic romance author with Siren and Sassy Vixen Publishing. Her writing explores many facets of romance from ultimate betrayal to finding your soul mate. Her poetry serves as a companion to her novels and has inspired entire series all on their own. Tammy and her alter egos Lia Michaels and Stephanie Ryan make up the core authors at Sassy Vixen Publishing and together they've created the shared world series Temptations Resort. Look for the first books in that series to come out later this year.

Now happily married to her own Muse and soul mate, she continues to live her dream and act as secretary to all her characters demanding to have their stories told.

Check out:

Tammy's Website
Tammy's Blog
Tammy's Books on Bookstrand, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords,  and iTunesSassy Vixen Publishing
Friend Tammy on Facebook
Like Tammy's Facebook Author Page
Friend Tammy on Goodreads
Friend Tammy on Pinterest
Follow Tammy on Twitter
Find Tammy's Videos on Youtube