This document provides information and guidance for editors on formatting books for e-book publication. It discusses why publishers are interested in e-books, current e-book market statistics and trends, the history of e-readers and devices, and the key steps and considerations for formatting manuscripts for e-book formats, including cleaning up styles, formatting chapters and headings, handling images and graphics, and publishing options.
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E-Book Editing Guide for Publishers
1. E-book Editing for Editors
Susan K. Stewart
Practical Inspirations
www.practicalinspirations.com
https://www.slideshare.net/skstewart/presentations
2. Why?
The information will help you help your publisher
Convert out-of-print books to e-books
Faster time to market
Lower expenses
Lower price to consumer
Can be offered in multiple formats
Easier global distribution
Easy to update
3. Statistics
Publishers saw increase in revenue February 2020 to
February 2021
19.1%
By format
Hardback – 26.9%
Paper – 9.2%
Mass Market – 35.7%
Ebooks – 19.8%
Downloaded audio – 27.8%
Religious Press – 13.7%
“AAAP February 2021 Statshot Report: Publishing Industry Up 24.7% For Second Month Of 2021, And 16.4% Year To
Date” Association of American Publishers, April 21, 2021, https://publishers.org/news/aap-february-2021-statshot-
report-publishing-industry-up-24-7-for-second-month-of-2021-and-16-4-year-to-date/, accessed May 6, 2021.
4. Statistics
“Amazon's Ebook Market Share 2019-2020,” (updated March 2021)
https://publishdrive.com/amazon-ebook-market-share.html, January 28, 2019, accessed May 6,
2021.
5. Micro-history
1971 - Project Gutenberg, goal to put all public domain
and documents in e-form
1991 - Sony DataDiscman, used compact discs,
primarily used for technical manuals
2006 – Sony produced an e-reader, PRS-500, to
download material to the device
2007 – Amazon brought out the Kindle
2009 – Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook
2009 – Amazon released Kindle for PC
2010 – Kobo eReader was introduced by Kobo, Inc.
2010 – Amazon released the first apps for phones
7. Questionsfor
Clients
What do you expect from e-books?
Tell me a little about e-book project?
Beyond content, what do you think your audience
is expecting?
Have you considered the cover?
8. Prepublication
Decisions
Write a book proposal
File types
PDF, RTF, MOBI, EPUB, AZW
Formatting Options
DIY or a service (even if choosing s service
some of this will help)
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
9. Prepublication
Tasks
Set up accounts
Kindle Direct Publishing account
ISBN
Library of Congress
Copyright
Marketing
Social Media
Blog
Newsletter
10. Formatting
Fundamentals
Learn to use Word styles
Sidebars, pull quotes, columns
All must go
Clean up the manuscript
Throw away page numbers, footnotes, headers and footers
Stick with standard fonts
Serif for body, sans serif for headings
Look for fonts that have italic, bold, in the font family
Page breaks
Chapter titles
Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles
Formatting paragraphs
Footnotes changed to endnotes
Table of Contents
Links – Internal and external
11.
12.
13. Formatting
Fundamentals
Learn to use Word styles
Sidebars, pull quotes, columns
All must go
Clean up the manuscript
Throw away page numbers, footnotes, headers and footers
Stick with standard fonts
Serif for body, sans serif for headings
Look for fonts that have italic, bold, in the font family
Page breaks
Chapter titles
Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles
Formatting paragraphs
Footnotes changed to endnotes
Table of Contents
Links – Internal and external
14. Sidebarsand
Footnotes
Sidebar information
Can create text box sidebars
Don’t fit well
Include in appendix
Add to text
Pull quotes
Remove
Highlight with bold text
Footnotes
Convert to Endnotes
End of chapter
End of book
15. Formatting
Fundamentals
Learn to use Word styles
Sidebars, pull quotes, columns
All must go
Clean up the manuscript
Throw away page numbers, footnotes, headers and footers
Stick with standard fonts
Serif for body, sans serif for headings
Look for fonts that have italic, bold, in the font family
Page breaks
Chapter titles
Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles
Formatting paragraphs
Footnotes changed to endnotes
Table of Contents
Links – Internal and external
16. Tableof
Contents
Use Word tools
Styles
TOC requires Heading 1 or H1 for chapter heads
Sub-heads
Heading 2 or H2
Insert Index and Table ….
17.
18.
19. Formatting
Fundamentals
Learn to use Word styles
Sidebars, pull quotes, columns
All must go
Clean up the manuscript
Throw away page numbers, footnotes, headers and footers
Stick with standard fonts
Serif for body, sans serif for headings
Look for fonts that have italic, bold, in the font family
Page breaks
Chapter titles
Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles
Formatting paragraphs
Footnotes changed to endnotes
Table of Contents
Links – Internal and external
20. Graphics
Images must be inserted as a file. Not copied and
pasted
Text boxes, sometimes used for sidebars, need to
be graphic images.
The more images, the more expensive the e-book
is to sell.
Fixed Format for image-heavy books
Children’s books
Graphic novels
Coffee Table Books
21. OtherDetails
Front Matter
Title page
Copyright page
Table of Contents
“Look Inside” feature
About 10%
Get to content quickly
Endorsements, acknowledgments, dedication in the
back
22. Publishing
How?
Convert DOC file to HTML
Upload the file
Preview
KDP points out spelling errors
One more proofreading
Don’t panic if it’s not quite right
Correct problems in the DOC file and return to step 1.
23.
24. Publishing
How?
Convert DOC file to HTML
Upload the file
Preview
KDP points out spelling errors
One more proofreading
Don’t panic if it’s not quite right
Correct problems in the DOC file and return to step 1.
25. Publishing
Where?
Free
Kindle Direct Publishing
Apple iBooks
Smashwords (multiple distribution excluding Amazon)
Draft2Digtal
For fee
IngramSpark (distribution to 70 online retailers
including Amazon)
Lulu
Bookbaby
I’ll be honest — I still curl up with a print book. Most of the Bible studies I use are print. Print isn’t going to die.
How did I — writer and editor – end up learning ths e-book techie stuff? When I published my first e-book I couldn’t afford to hire a formatter. I set out to learn.
Later I was asked by a small publishing company to convert their books to e-books.
About 2011, I turned the information into classes for writers and editors. I still teach the one for editors for the PEN Institute.
I read books, read websites — I don’t do videos — and learned. Twelve files later—I was able to upload to KDP.
I may not have learned the standard technical way…but I did learn the writer’s way.
We won’t be able to go into all the details of having a completely formatted e-book. We will be able to cover what you need to look for as an editor when you know your client is planning an e-book.
Even though I can format my own e-books, I do use a designer especially when I have tricky formatting. Honestly, I’m not in the formatting business — I’m a writer and editor.
Even if your client is using a designer, your help in cleaning up the file will make a happy designer and smother process.
I do offer a class through the PEN Institute E-book Formatting for Editors 101. It is scheduled to begin September 20. As an PENCON attendee, you may register early — like as soon as this session is over.
Let’s begin with a few of the reasons for e-books.
Some publishers still only offer print books … it depends on how interested I am in the book as to whether I’ll buy print. Most reference books I’ll buy print.
These stats are from an organization of traditional publishers. Does not consider the non-traditional publishers. It is also based on revenue, not items sold. Of course, hardbacks earn more than ebooks.
Notice the jump in audio books.
2019 numbers
Amazon 53% - All others 47% (2019 January to September)
With the proliferation of “write a book in a 30 days, seven days, a weekend,” a lot of e-books aren’t good books. Many lack editing or even author proofreading. Sadly many don’t think an e-book needs to be the same quality of writing as a print book.
I mentioned good books often lack even a cursory proofread by the editor. If I get a manuscript for e-book clean up and it needs some editing, I won’t work on it until the editing is completed. Some of us may be hired to do both — in this case another proofreader is also needed.
I’m editor, why should I care about the cover? A cover is more than a pretty picture. It’s the first marketing tool of the book. We editors know the publishing business. We know what works. While an e-book isn’t going to have a back cover blurb or author bio, there are elements we can help with. I recommend scrolling through an online book store. See what’s selling and take note of the covers. Which covers attrack your attention? You can help guide your client.
Consider the reader. Some of the details I’ll be talking about are specifically for the reader to have a good experience with an e-book. Readers have come to expect the same quality and sometimes same look as a print book.
I like to ask these questions of my clients. It helps me know how I can help them have a quality product.
E-books have become so easy sometimes little thought is given beyond writing words and uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing or other platform.
I ask the question about the cover at the beginning. Too often first-time writers don’t give much thought to the cover until it’s time to publish. Get them to thinking about it at the beginning of the process.
Why write a proposal for a self-published book? It helps a writer understand, it’s not just a book—it’s a business. To know the audience, to know the purpose of the book, to know the competition, to have a solid plan for the book. It will help answer questions about the options you have available.
FILE TYPES – all of these can be used by Kindle Direct, but not all e-publishing platforms use all of them. Check with the company.
A PDF (Portable Document Format) is easy for most computer users now. It is not always the best option for an e-reader.
Format is fixed and loses some of the features of an e-reader, such as a Kindle. For example, it doesn’t resize the pages or font size. I provide PDF option for my books because they are easy for readers to print.
RTF – Rich Text Format – allows to use files across platforms, except Adobe. This format can be used when moving from say Pages to Word. The formatting can be still be inconsistent. It’s fallen out of favor in recent years.
MOBI - is the foundation format for Kindle AZW format. MOBI formats can be sold on websites and used on Kindle with fewer of the problems the other formats may have.
EPUB – is the e-book format used by all other publishing options such as iBooks and Barnes & Noble. While a Word file can be uploaded to KDP and Smashwords, an EPUB is required for all the others. Scrivner and Pages can export to EPUB. It may take some tweaking for a good quality file.
AZW – This is Amazon proprietary file format. No one is really sure what the letters means. When KDP converts a file for publishing, it becomes an AZW file.
RTF, Word Docs, MOBI, and EPUBs can be uploaded to KDP. A PDF can be uploaded, but it creates numerous problems with e-book formatting. If a client wants a fixed format, such as a children’s book, Kindle’s Children’s book creator or textbook creator. Both of these are exclusionary.
DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT
This is a method of protecting a document from being duplicates, and in some cases from being printed. It also prevents moving from one device to another.
Most DRM can easily be broken by readily available.
People share, give away, and sell print books and few worry about it.
This is an issue the writer must decide. I tried to find articles that gave reasons for using DRM – and couldn’t find any.
ISBN – misunderstood …. It declares who the publisher is not the owner of the manuscript. When a “free” or low-cost ISBN is the issuing company owns the ISBN and is considered the publisher. For example, if a free ISBN from KDP is used, the publisher will be listed as Kindle Direct Publishing. This may affect sales outside of Amazon. A different ISBN is needed for each format — paper, hardback, e-book, etc. This can be a tough decision for writers on a budget.
Go to Julie Williams session on styles tomorrow morning.
STYLES NEXT SLIDE
STYLES NEXT SLIDE
Make an appointment with Julie Williams
Styles next slide
SIDEBARS DETAIL NEXT SLIDE
Convert footnotes to endnotes – because an e-book is actually one long document, it will stick a footnote what appears to be randomly in a page. Use endnotes. A Word tool – different for Windows and Mac OS
Start clean up manuscript
TOC NEXT SLIDE
H1-H2 SLIDE NEXT
TOC
Choose TOC in top menu
Uncheck Show page number
Modify
LINKS
Fixed format — Kindle children’s book creator
Textbook creator
Can only be distributed through Amazon
I recommend a formatter/designer
Don’t put TOC in back
Convert to HTML – next slide
Save as ,,,,,
Web Page Filters
Creates two files
“zip” these files together — MAC uses archive tool.
Upload File
For PDF – Save as — select PDF — when asked select use for electronic distribution.