A GENTLE REMINDER TO SELF

A professional editor is not the same as a proofreader. A professional editor helps bring out things you didn’t think were possible. A proofreader picks up errors that Auto Correct or a dictionary or a professional editor miss.

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU EVER KNEW!

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When I was about eight or nine years old, my brother brought home a portable manual typewriter. It fascinated me, and thus began my love affair with typing.

I memorized every single one of the keys and learned to type rather quickly using only four fingers, the index and middle ones on either hand.

Later on, in my first typing class in high school, my teacher became very frustrated with me when I continued to exhibit the skills I had learned instead of placing all of my fingers on the keys in the manner she was trying to teach me.

“But it slows me down,” I insisted. “I already know where the keys are.”

She (God rest your weary soul Mrs. Chapman) very gently cupped my face between her hands and looked me dead center in the eyes.

“FORGET EVERYTHING YOU EVER KNEW!”

I thought about those five little words when I started trying to publish my first e-book, and decided they are the most important things I could tell any author attempting to do the same.

Especially the formatting part!

Save yourself a lot of trouble and set it up the right way from the beginning.

What is the right way?

Amazon has an excellent formatting guideline for MobiPocket files (which is the only thing they use). It can be found here.

Some of the things they don’t cover is what I’m going to talk about.

Formatting a Normal Paragraph: Click on Format. Select Style. Click on Format. Select Style. Click on Normal. Select Modify. Select Format. Select Paragraph.

You want to make sure the Alignment is set to Justified. Indent First line to 0.25 (or more if you so desire). Everything else is set to zero (0) except the Spacing After. You must change it to 12 pt if you want extra space between the paragraphs. That will put in a nice extra line to keep everything from running together, without having to insert the return key to separate them. (That is a no-no.) The line spacing is optional. Keep it single or change to 1.5. Do not use double. (FORGET EVERYTHING YOU EVER KNEW about double spacing.)

See (for example) the line spacing in this post. I didn’t add the extra return between my paragraphs. The back-end formatting took care of all that. Kudos to somebody at WordPress, who knows what they are doing!

More to follow, as we all learn…by doing.

Related articles

• Which is the best format for ebooks? | Ask Jack (guardian.co.uk)
• How to Customize Default Line Spacing in Microsoft Word 2007, 2010 (ghacks.net)

INDIE AUTHOR—MEANING WHAT? INDEPENDENT?

Of all the words in the English dictionary, independent would best describe me. Doing things bass-ackwards from the rest of the world has always been my pinnacle. From the time I took center stage in a beauty pageant, walking on in the wrong direction from the rest of the participants—to choosing the hardest thing to make in Home Economics first instead of last—to messing up the sequence of my cue cards in a debate speech and having to ad lib it, I knew I was different.

Why should publishing my first novel be anything but?

It was an easy decision for me to take the Indie route. When I finally found my Round Tuit, and actually produced a completed book, the publishing world had changed.

   By way of explanation, my famous last words whenever talking to a friend about wanting to write a book, I would say, “I just never got around to it.” So she gave me one like the picture above, and informed me with a huge smile that now I had no excuse.

There are still rules and regulations that must be followed when publishing an E-Book. The instructions are provided in the guidelines of whatever venue you decide to use, whether it be an E-Pub or a Mobi file. Let me go one step further and say that however precise these instructions are, if you’re like me (technically-challenged is putting it mildly), a good e-book editor can come in handy for doing the conversion process. There are literally scads of them out there. Google electronic book conversion services and you can find a plethora, from the shockingly expensive ones to a price that is within reason.

One such service of interest is Milverstead Publishing, LLC. I was particularly impressed to see that they donate five dollars of every sale they make to a charity.

With that being said, and getting back to the independent me, I am on a mission to glean whatever knowledge I can from the different software packages that do the conversion process, with Calibre being first on the list. To paraphrase Han Solo, “May the force be with me.” 

Related articles

• Calibre Aces Ebook Conversion and Management (arnoldit.com)