I Made an eBook. I Took Notes.

I decided earlier to offer a free e-book. I'm so excited - and it seems like it'll be a lot of fun work, in the good cause of getting my name out there.

I thought I'd mention that in the creation of an e-book, I'll have to perform several file conversions, because I want to cater to all types of digital display media. Since I'm running Linux, I get to browse the free distributions of programs to help me do this. Sure enough, there's Calibre, which manages and converts an entire library for free.

I read Mark Coker's Style Guidelines for Smashwords.com. As a DIY, all-possible-proceeds-must-go-to-me-and-not-a-giant-company publisher, I will not be using Smashwords. But if you want to know a little bit about formatting, there's a wonderful little ebook of all the style guides.

I don't like Smashwords because while they recognize the respect that readers have for words, they don't understand the need for authors to respect their own words. I was troubled by their appellation of the term 'Meat Grinder' to what they're going to be doing to your manuscript. No, thank you - and I even understand the great principle of what Meat Grinder does (it packages a default manuscript from your average Word document that can be easily translated into all ebook compatible files). But they called it Meat Grinder, like my words and characters were about as useful as a cow shoulder.

I will, however, make use of all their free information toward the best way to format my ebook. I haven't thought about it because I don't read much online, aside from RSS feeds. I have a stack of PDF's from back in the day that I can't bear to look at. I don't have a Kindle.

Calibre has certainly made my job easier, because I can view my converted and formatted files to see if they look at all right on an e-reader. First, I reformatted my manuscript in Open Office. I resized it to be about the average ebook size per page, because even though Mark Coker claims that the page is dead, I still have to work with the page until I can convert it. But here's what I had to do:

1. No page breaks, no page numbers, no line breaks - This was an important part in making my manuscript look fluid and professional as an ebook. By no line breaks, I mean not pressing the enter key more than once, no matter what text you're trying to arrange.
2. Style formatting - I hadn't started working with Styles until the past few months with my manuscript. I can't believe how shortsighted my formatting had been. If you assign a Style to a section consistently (i.e. chapter headings, chapters, secondary headings, endnotes), then you can change them on the Stylesheet instead of having to tab through (as I used to) and change formatting manually.
3. Paragraph formatting - I used hanging indent, and when I publish non-fiction, I'll use block-style. I edited the Styles to reflect this, instead of pressing enter, then tab to start a new paragraph.

After I finished, my manuscript feels much cleaner!

The Crow Hunter ebook will be available for download starting Feb. 9!