On the Conversion to Ebooks

As many of you know, I have started selling digital versions of my stories. Ebooks, if you will. These have gone up for sale here on the website, Amazon.com, and on Smashwords.

As someone who has never dabbled in the ebook market, I was a bit flustered when it came to converting my regular manuscript in to a format that would suit the various ereaders that are out there. I tried once, twice, three times, and failed. I read the Smashwords style guide, Googled a bunch of info, and still it didn’t seem like I would ever get it.

I tried Calibre for conversion, that didn’t work. I tried the Amazon uploader, that didn’t work. GAH! How frustrating. Then I finally caught a break…by accident, and figured this whole mess out.

So here are my tips for converting your manuscript to a format that will look nice and pretty on a Kindle, Sony, or Nook. I’m using WordMac, by the way.

Turn off the auto correction function – When you write a document, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t see. When you convert that document to an ebook, all those things become glaringly clear, and they’re not good. Turning off the auto correction will eliminate the Word program from inserting invisible things that could be harmful to your ebook.

Never hit the ENTER key more than 5 times – This could cause a whole bunch of blank space to show up in your ebook. If you need to separate pages, use the Insert Page Break Function. To see how many times you’re hitting the ENTER key, click on the reverse P thingy on your menu bar at the top. That will show you all the non-printing characters your document has.

Don’t indent your work manually – This was the hardest thing for me to grasp. You start a paragraph, you indent 5 spaces, right? Not so with a ebook. It won’t work and will look all hokey on your finished document. Instead, Select All in the Edit section of your document. Then up top on the ruler bar, slide the top arrow over to where you want your paragraphs to begin. This will indent the beginning of each paragraph for you, thus saving you a whole lot of headaches later on.

Those are the biggest hurdles, I think, when it comes to converting your manuscript to an ebook. Once you have that all done, save it as a .doc file. Not a PDF, not a .txt and certainly not a .rtf. Amazon best converts .doc files when uploading to the Kindle. PDFs look funny, and so do all the other formats. The good thing about the Amazon DTP uploader, is that it lets you preview what your book will look like on the Kindle before you hit the publish button.

So while it may all seem a bit daunting, once you get the hang of it, you’ll be off to the races. Do I have all the answers? No, and I’m sure there’s some things that others do that work much, much better. For now though, I’ve learned what works for me, and as long as I can get my books up on the Kindle, I’m happy.

~JM