Preparing your document for. ebook conversion

Transcription

1 Preparing your document for ebook conversion

2 Thank you for choosing BookBaby to distribute your ebook. We are proud to deliver high quality ebook conversion services for our authors. This guide can be used as a step-by-step checklist to prepare your manuscript file for ebook conversion. Note: This information in this guide is specific to preparing your manuscript for ebook conversion and does not apply to preparing your book files for printing. If you are ordering printed books please read our guide, How to prepare your files for book printing guide available for download here: FIRST THINGS FIRST Before you start doing any formatting work, do yourself a huge favor: Take the time to read over your manuscript one more time BOOKBABY DOES NOT PROOFREAD YOUR FILE. It s very time consuming and costly for authors to make any changes to your manuscript once you ve uploaded it to BookBaby. Our conversion process is very detailed and built to provide highquality epub and.mobi file outputs. Making changes even small ones requires us to restart the process from scratch. We ll need to charge $100 to remove your file from the process and to submit an entirely new file. If you require us to make changes to the file, it will cost $50 + $2 for each change over the first 10. The epub file we send out after conversion is for formatting purposes only. You can use it to put on your ereader to preview how your book will look in a digital format. It is NOT meant as an editing or galley proof. Any errors that BookBaby has introduced into the conversion process will be corrected at no charge. There are a few simple things you must do to ensure your manuscript meets industry standards for ebook conversion and distribution. Author Naming: Pick one main author with all others listed as Contributors. Contributors can also include illustrators, editors, and other applicable credits. Wherever the author or contributor names appear on the book cover or in the manuscript they must be spelled exactly the same as they are in the metadata survey fields you complete when signing up your book with BookBaby and they must be cased appropriately. This means that the first letter of both first and last name should be capital letters. (Ex: Oscar Wilde)

3 If you are writing and publishing under a pen name it must be unique. For instance your pen name cannot be Mark Twain. If you are an entity or organization then that name can be used as the author. For instance National Geographic. Author name cannot contain a URL or contact information even if author is identifying as a website or blog. Titles and Subtitles: Capitalize only the principal words of your title and subtitle. Articles, conjunctions, and prepositions do not get capital letters unless they start the title. For example: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Acronyms may stay all caps. As with the author name the title and subtitle must match the title and subtitle provided on the cover. Titles and subtitles cannot contain URLs or contact information, regardless of content. Watch out for these potential issues: Competing Links: Your ebook manuscript should not reference amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, etc. or any other competitor sites. You can mention Amazon or any other store as long as there is not a direct link to buying the book on a specific platform. Physical References: Your ebook cannot contain references to page numbers. Offers: You cannot offer your readers an offer on the ebook. For example you can t say Buy this book and receive a free poster. Trademarks and copyright information: We can only accept content to which you own the copyright or have obtained permission to use. You cannot include trademarks such as logos, themes, and certain characters on your cover even if the trademark is an original drawn illustration. Copyright information: Make sure your ebook doesn t violate copyright laws. All public domain material should have content added to it to make it unique. Pricing: Do not include pricing for any product in the ebook or metadata. (Do not include pricing or UPC anywhere.)

4 TEXT AND IMAGE QUALITY: All images for ebooks should be supplied in RGB (red, green, blue) color format. Images must be a minimum of 150dpi but we recommend 300dpi for better image clarity. Your text cannot wrap around images, callouts or other elements. Images must be in line with your text. Text must be readable. We recommend a minimum font size of 12pt within the body of the manuscript. Use one common font, such as Arial or Times New Roman. Do not embed fonts into your manuscript. Your ebook cannot contain only scanned images. Children s books are the exception but must have real text where possible such as the copyright page, dedication, table of contents, etc. All text in your document must be searchable and editable. STYLING YOUR MANUSCRIPT: When it comes to formatting, ebooks and printed books are completely different. With ebook and ereader technology continuing to evolve it is best to keep this one rule in mind with formatting your manuscript. Keep the formatting simple and consistent. By keeping the formatting simple your ebook will be easier to view/read on an ereader. Below you will find best practices for using styles in your manuscript. Formatting Styles: (H1) Heading 1 Use this style for your book title. (H2) Heading 2 Use this style for your chapter headings. (H3) Heading 3 Use this style for subsections. Normal Use when block formatting paragraphs. Normal Indent Use for indenting the beginning of your paragraphs. Tip: You must keep all of your style usage consistent. For example if you H2 for the Chapter 1 heading then all of the chapter headings must be H2. Attention: There are many methods for formatting paragraphs. One way is to display the paragraphs in block formatting with a space between paragraphs and the other is First line indent

5 with no spaces between paragraphs. You can also choose to indent and add a space the paragraphs. Pick the style that works best for your manuscript. Fonts: Use standard or common fonts when choosing fonts for your ebook. Using a stylized font might not convert correctly and will be substituted for a common font. Examples of common fonts are: Arial, Book Antigua, Courier, Garamond and Times New Roman to name a few. You can use bold, italic, and underline. Please apply these setting from the formatting menu and do not use font variations. Need help designing a book cover? Turn to the experts at BookBaby for a great looking cover design. Tip: Do not embed fonts into your ebook manuscript. Hard returns: Your text should wrap naturally. Pressing the return key should not be the way to break up sentences to start new lines. Only use the return/enter key to start new paragraphs. Tip: Use the Show all hidden formatting button to see all hard returns. If you see hard returns in the middles of the paragraphs delete them and let your text wrap naturally. PAGE FORMATTING: ebooks are composed of reflowable text. This allows the font to automatically adjust based on the ereader screen size or if the font size is changed on the reader. Conversion Tip: While page numbers, page breaks, headers, and footers don t exist in ebooks a page break must be inserted before the use of an H2 style format to indicate the start of a new chapter or section. This will not only create a new entry in the epub Table of Contents but will also allow every chapter or section to start on a new page on the ereader. Text Alignment: Alignment can be adjusted by the reader on many devices. We recommend left justification with a ragged right margin. You can choose left or center alignment but please do not use full or right justification. Your cover is your primary sales force. Let our design experts take your vision and create an impactful book cover and manuscript format that will drive sales and help you compete against bestsellers for reader s attention on the world s virtual bookshelves. Book Cover Design: ebook-cover-design

6 Spaces and Hard Returns: Avoid double spaces after punctuation marks as well as extra spaces between words. To start a new page insert a page break rather than hitting the return key several times. Headers and Footers: Do not use headers or footers as they vary from device to device. Instead, incorporate important content into the body of your manuscript or use endnotes. Text Boxes, Tables, and Mathematical Elements: The following do not work well in a dynamic environment and may be captured as an image: Charts, Text Boxes, Scientific/Mathematic formulas, tables, and embedded objects like HTML, Smart Art, etc Tips: If you must include any of the elements above, we recommend replacing them with a high quality JPEG image in RGB color mode. Drop Caps: Drop Caps are not supported on all devices and are not recommended. Multimedia Files: Audio and video files are only supported with fixed layout conversion. At this time BookBaby only offers fixed layout ebook for ibooks. UPLOADING YOUR MANUSCRIPT TO BOOKBABY FOR EBOOK CONVERSION: In order to produce the best looking ebooks please upload your manuscript source file in Word (.doc,.docx), or InDesign (.indd) formats. While we do accommodate other file types, including Rich Text (.rtf), Text file (.txt), HTML (.html), Pages (.pages), Quark (.qxd),.pdf (pdf), these files types may take longer to convert and will require careful proofing by the author. Want an expert to handle this for you? If you would like to skip all of these steps and allow our professional book designers to do all of the heavy lifting for you please check out our books design services here: BOOKBABY.COM BOOKS@BOOKBABY.COM 7905 N. Crescent Blvd., Pennsauken, NJ 08110