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    Format Your eBook the Free and Easy Way
    Format Your eBook the Free and Easy Way
    Format Your eBook the Free and Easy Way
    Ebook79 pages39 minutes

    Format Your eBook the Free and Easy Way

    By J. Gunnar Grey

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Now updated for Smashwords formatting and external links--the ebook formatting manual that’s produced a hundred polished winners on sales sites around the world!

    So you’ve published your book, manual, or short story, using the Kindle Direct Upload system. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? It’s one of the greatest, no-cost, direct-to-market enablers ever created. Kindle Direct allows writers to bypass agents, editors, and publishing companies, and place their literary masterpieces straight in front of readers.

    It also suffers from formatting errors. You upload your book or story and find extra returns, indents in the wrong places, too-large or nonexistent indents, et cetera, et cetera. You’re grateful that Amazon.com has created Kindle Direct. But you really wish they’d fix this.

    Or maybe you’re scared to try Kindle Direct. Maybe a friend has uploaded a book and you’re appalled at its appearance (even if you won’t say so to her face). Maybe you’ve bought an ebook and thought, “Ugh, wow, that could be me. NOT.” Then you price a professional e-typesetting job, and you’re back to being scared.

    Any of that familiar? Then this manual is for you. Using two shareware programs, anyone with basic computer skills and the ability to follow simple directions can successfully format a word processing document for upload to Amazon.com and all those other ebook sales websites. As well, there are instructions for attaching the cover, inserting illustrations, and creating a table of contents. The system has been independently tested by other writers, so you know in advance it works. Best of all, except for the incredibly reasonable cost of this manual, plus any donations you decide to make to the shareware programs--the system is free.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDingbat Publishing
    Release dateMar 15, 2012
    ISBN9781476351100
    Format Your eBook the Free and Easy Way

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      Book preview

      Format Your eBook the Free and Easy Way - J. Gunnar Grey

      Format Your eBook the Free and Easy Way

      by

      J. Gunnar Grey

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2011 by J. Gunnar Grey

      Dingbat Publishing

      Humble, Texas

      Published in the United States of America 2011 by Dingbat Publishing

      Copyright © 2011 by J. Gunnar Grey

      http://the1940mysterywriter.weebly.com/

      ISBN 9781476351100

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      To the wonderful crew at Astraea Press, for giving me the chance. Writers, if your clean story wants a home, check out Astraea’s submission requirements.

      A special thanks to Chris Stout, MFA, awesome university-professor-to-be, and writer of The Stout Files, for allowing me to use the early upload of his nail-biting thriller, Days of Reckoning, as an example of what NOT to do.

      And another special thanks to Jessica Knauss, declared a famous writer in 1985, author of Sail to and from Italy, for giving this formatting system a test when the manuscript was a rough draft.

      Also by J. Gunnar Grey

      Deal with the Devil

      Trophies

      Shakedown

      Unwanted Wives

      Ballistic Basics

      Introduction

      Why should I buy this book? I mean, why not just use the Kindle Direct upload system?

      You mean, besides this book’s incredibly reasonable price? Fact is, the Kindle Direct upload system can cause formatting errors in your finished, for-sale book. And that makes it look unprofessional. It lowers the quality level and causes the reader (hopefully the buyer) to wonder if the story is unprofessional, too.

      Here’s an example. This is a passage from Days of Reckoning, a thriller written and Kindle published by author Chris Stout:

      So one line was indented when it shouldn’t have been. Big deal. Why should I worry about that?

      Because it doesn’t happen only once. It happens over, and over, and over. Here’s another example a few pages later:

      Think about it this way. You want people to read your book. But it’s not always easy to convince them to part with the money, so you give them a free sample to download and read, hoping they’ll get hooked on the story and decide they can’t live without the rest of it. Right?

      So they’re reading along and enjoying the first chapter of your brilliant masterpiece. And then they come across the first error. It might not be an out-of-place indentation. It might be a misspelling or substituted word that slipped past your spell-check and critique partners. Or it might be a grammar lapse, or where you accidentally added or deleted a word. It happens, and when it does, it tends to jolt the reader out of the story-world and into reality while he or she sorts through the words to decide what the author really meant to say.

      Almost every book that reaches publication these days, including those from publishing houses both large and small, contains some errors of this sort. The more errors there are, the more often the reader is jolted from the story-world, and the more opportunities he or she has to wonder if it’s worth it

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