As I was talking to a new author the other day, I realized that it’s been some time since the formatting guidelines we’ve covered here on the MGC have been updated. Since that conversation, I have written, and published, a short story. I thought about this post, which I was planning to write, and looked at the amount of time I had, and didn’t do what I should have done. Which is to have formatted manually with screenshots, so I could walk a new author through the process. Instead, short on time and energy, I ran it through Vellum and got a nice manuscript with all the parts you need for an ebook on the other side. Copyright page, frontmatter (in this case, a foreword), table of contents, author bio, ‘Also by…’ (with live, store-specific links) and last but not least the ‘You might also like…’ where I promoted books by friends: all of those generate automagically and many of them imported with a single click from prior manuscripts. I love Vellum!
I don’t actually recommend Vellum to a new author. Yes, it’s the gold standard, it’s easy to use, it will give you a fantastic print and ebook version (for novella and longer, naturally) with a single click to generate when you have the manuscript all set up in it. I really love it, and for me the steep entry price was completely worth it and it has paid itself off. But! It is $250 to buy, and requires a Mac computer to run – I picked up a used one for about $300, so that was about a $600 initial investment after cables and taxes. Which you absolutely do not need to do when you are starting out. If you do decide on it, and have the budget, it is the best. I do suggest looking at their initial import FAQ, as importing a clean document to begin with will eliminate many of the issues I’ve seen people report while using Vellum. I came to Vellum after getting a quote from an individual for formatting a novel – $100, if you are curious, about five years ago now – and they told me to set up the manuscript in a certain way before sending it to them. I’ve followed the guidelines (linked above) while doing my word-processing since, and have had no issues.
The simplest way to learn how to format your book is to start with the Kindle Direct Print (kdp) tutorial and walk your way through that. Even if you don’t plan on being Amazon-only with your books, this is a clear and thorough method. There is a lot of information in the sidebar on that page. Take some time to go through it, and you’ll get a solid start on publishing.
If you are working on a book which has a lot of graphics, special formatting requirements (like poetry), or needs specific considerations for tables as in a textbook, then I recommend Affinity Publisher. This is the buy-once-own-forever software that is the equivalent of Adobe’s InDesign, without the steep monthly subscription fees and the ever-present threat that if you can’t afford those, you will lose access to all of your files forever (yes, this is what happened to me, after trying a trial of the sub, then deciding I’d rather use my previously-purchased and licensed version. I was locked out of years of work and will never, ever, use Adobe or recommend it again). Where did that soapbox come from?
As I was saying, Affinity Publisher is a great manual layout program. You will not need or want it for most fiction ebooks or print books. There is a steep learning curve to using it, particularly if you aren’t already familiar with it’s more expensive (but no more capable) competitor. There is a great deal of help on their website, and many video tutorials which can assist as well.
If you are going to format in your word-processing program as outlined on the kdp website, then you will also want a free program called Calibre to generate your ebook as an ePub (note that Mobi has been deprecated and is no longer needed for Amazon). You can also use it for other formats if you have a more obscure outlet, but for that I really recommend using a distributor like Draft2Digital (D2D) if you plan to go wide with your book, and they help with ensuring your book is formatted correctly after your initial document.
There are other programs out there for formatting. I know friends who use Atticus, and I haven’t tried it myself, but it seems to be a bit more clunky and the results not as modifiable or elegant-looking as Vellum gives me. Vellum will allow for the insertion of images, by the way, but you will have less control than a manual manuscript design which Affinity Publisher gives you.
This may all seem overwhelming to the new author. However, if you take the time to follow the links in the post, read through the guidelines, and write a cleanly set-up manuscript, you’ll find that pays off when it comes time to generate the ebook and print versions for publication. Begin as you mean to go on.
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Formatting a Book”
Thank you Cedar! Even us old dogs need to learn new tricks, and keep up with what’s available, and be ready to leap as companies keep changing.
Indeed! I started out doing my formatting with Word and Calibre and it’s still possible, but takes longer than I want to spend these days.
And then there’s Atticus which I’ve been experimenting with. Don’t have enough experience yet to recommend it one way or the other.
Bill now uses Affinity for our trade paperbacks and he loves it. He can make it do tricks! We layout very complicated books with loads of art, borders, bleed to the edge of the page, headers, footer art, footnotes, and every other frill and flourish.
He started doing layout in Word and succeeded but he doesn’t recommend it. Affinity is better. It got MUCH better when they added a footnote function so we no longer need to use Word for layout at all.
Affinity is very powerful, loaded with tricks, but you have to pay close attention, watch the YouTube tutorials, and read the instructions carefully. It’s very easy to miss a checkbox and then wonder why nothing is working right.
Our most complicated book would have cost us several thousand dollars for a trade layout. Affinity let Bill format it inhouse for the cost of his time.
It does help that he used to do layouts when he worked at various newspapers.
One thing that can still cause glitches (less so with Vellum, now) is if you have a manuscript that uses Word Styles. Not for things like basic paragraphs or chapter headings, but if you format the document using Styles templates, it can really cause a headache in Caliber, and even Vellum depending on which version of Word you have.
I did that once. Once … Now I use Vellum, but still skip Styles.
I have used Scrivener for two books. The first time I needed the organization it provided. At the end I had to take everything out of Scrivener, and arrange it through Pages. But for the second book I managed to make Scrivener give me a really good ePub file with most of the front and back matter discussed above, and chapter subtitles, as long as they were only three words long. I still had to do the manuscript by hand, but clearly that might be my own ignorance. I was looking into Calibre for the ePub when I suddenly managed to make Scrivener do the right thing. Just FYI.
My work flow is:
-write wherever, but get the scenes into Scrivener as I complete them, so I can look at reordering them more easily, and keep any world building notes, thematic adjacent fanfics, etc in the same place. Doubly useful if I’m doing an episodic Vella release followed by a full novel; I just copy/paste out of Scrivener into Vella. I can and have gotten epub files out of Scrivener, but since my proofreaders prefer Word docs, there’s not a lot of point to either leaving it in scriv or exporting to epub at this stage.
-export to Word document with a minimum of formatting.
-download an Amazon template for print books in whatever trim size I’m doing. Fill in the placeholder text with my pen name, title, copyright date, etc, copy-paste chapters from manuscript, and fix any formatting issues (mostly changing font and font size) as I go. Create a linked table of contents (supposedly the bare minimum Amazon needs to make an ebook is a doc or docx with a linked table of contents, so it can make chapter headings).
-(I’ve only just created a master document of “Books By” with amazon links, going forward I need to remember to paste this into the back of the draft at this stage).
-submit to my proofreaders.
-make changes they recommend, finalize chapter layout (writing a few additional lines here and there sometimes gets the chapter headings in an awkward place, so that has to be fixed.)
-I now have a finalized page count, which means I can download a print cover template from Amazon, and fight with making that. (A saga in itself that only gets marginally easier over time).
-with regards to the ebook, I can submit the doc as is at this point. The Jaiya metaseries were mostly done this way, IIRC, and I haven’t really had complaints about them. Or I can go into Kindle Create, which has usually done okay for me: https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Create/b?ie=UTF8&node=18292298011
-Please note that Amazon will not accept the files Kindle Create generates for its own reference, you need to export.
Thank you for writing this, I hope it gets shared far and wide. I have too many self published books,as in hardcopy, that have ranged from painful to read to being completely unreadable. Producing a print book requires a few more steps than producing an ebook and some authors skip some or all of these steps.
There are some authors out there who are excellent storytellers, but who are completely ignorant when it comes to typesetting or formatting. I really enjoy your writing, but only when it is practical for me to read your work.
It’s been a long time since I touched it, but there’s a program called Alkinea that lets you go from LibreOffice to ePub.
Thanks! I had planned on buying Atticus when I get to the formatting stage, but now I will check out these other options first.
I use Emacs org-mode and calibre – I have a Mac but it’s 2011 and no newish software will install on it, and my Windows machine is a dog that i only use for tax software. I’m a Linux nerd.
I’m happy with the results I get, but would love to hear of any other Linux tools that I might want to look over.
There’s not an EMACS extension to do it already? 🙂
Yeah, EMACS is a neat operating system, but I don’t care for its text editor…
I never committed EMACS but I’m olde enough to know the joke ..