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Writing and Publishing eBooks Made Easy #12 - Designing Your eBook

Guest post by: Gary Baker

Article Overview: The good news is that, with a few clicks of your mouse, you can convert your manuscript directly into an eBook. The most common file format for an eBook is Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Writing and Publishing eBooks Made Easy #12 - Designing Your eBook

The good news is that, with a few clicks of your mouse, you can convert your manuscript directly into an eBook. The most common file format for an eBook is Adobe Acrobat PDF. You'll be doing the actual "design" of your book in your word-processing program.

Since Word is the most commonly used word processing program (and the one in which most e-publishers will expect your document), this chapter will focus on formatting in Word.

You do not need to actually own Adobe Acrobat to convert your eBook into a PDF file.

However, if you want to add more features to your PDF document (such as hotlinked URLs, forms, or pages imported from other programs), you will need to buy the program.

Designing Your eBook

A badly formatted eBook will alienate readers more quickly than a badly designed print book. At best, it will look amateurish; at worst, it will be difficult to read or "navigate."

Fortunately, you can create a professional "look" with just a few simple Word commands. You'll need to consider the following elements:

Page size - Most books aren't formatted to an 8.5x11-inch page. eBooks are typically between 5x7 and 6x9 (with 5.5x8.5 being a typical format).

Your first step, therefore, is to set a custom page size in Word's "Page Setup" menu.

Margins - Use Word's "Format: Document" command to set margins to a minimum of three quarters of an inch on all sides.

You may wish to set top and/or bottom margins slightly larger if you plan to use a header and/or footer.

Since eBooks don't have "left" and "right" pages, turn off the "mirror margins" option.

Headers and Footers - Place a "running header" at the top of each page. The easiest approach is to simply include the title of your book and the page number.

You can place this information flush left, flush right, or centred or you can place the title flush left and the page number flush right.

I recommend using a slightly smaller font size for the header, and (if you like) using italic or bold. I also like to use the "border" command to draw a line between the header and the text.

Another option is to put the title in your header and the page number in your footer.

Make sure that your header doesn't appear on the first page of each chapter by using the "Insert: Break: Section: Next Page" command (rather than a page break) to separate chapters.

Then, make sure that you've checked "different first page" in the "Format: Document: Layout" menu.

You can also create a new header for each chapter (e.g., using the chapter title rather than the book title); to do this, turn off the "same as previous" option in the header command.

Font - It's best to use standard fonts such as Times, Times New Roman, Century/New Century Schoolbook, or Palatino.

Non-serif fonts such as Arial or Helvetica are good for chapter headings and subheads. Use a minimum of 11 points for your text, and 12 to 14 points for subheads.

Since some fonts look better onscreen than in print, and vice versa, test your fonts both ways!

(Keep in mind that the reader can increase the display size of your book when reading it onscreen.)

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Article Tags: adobe acrobat, ebook, ebooks, file format, publishing ebooks, writing ebooks



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