eBook Publication - Practicing

I've released a new book, called Practicing.  This is a collection of short stories, representing my early "serious" fiction work and showcasing a lot of different ideas and styles as I "practiced" at writing.  I've made this collection FREE, so you have nothing to lose in trying it out.  If you like this work, you will of course like my other novel.  I cannot post eBooks on Amazon or B&N for free (without manipulating the price-matching system, which is more trouble than it's worth), so I'm posting it as a download here.  Get it in your preferred format on the Novels page.

Here is part of the Foreword, if you are curious.

In this collection, I preface each story with a little history, a bit about what I was doing then, what I was thinking when I wrote it, etc. They are not necessary to enjoy or understand each story, so you can skip them if you like, but since this collection is somewhat of a retrospective of how I learned to be a better writer—my practice if you will—it seemed appropriate to give some background and context for each one. 

You will notice that there are a number of occult-style stories, at least in the non-traditional sense. I was fascinated with vampires and occult at the time as I read a lot of Anne Rice and Clive Barker during that period, and I was attempting to come up with some unique takes on vampires, werewolves, witches, that sort of thing. Some are a bit off the wall, but I was young and experimenting.

Most all have some sort of double meaning to them, or a second underlying theme that plays off the title. I'm a big fan of early M. Night Shyamalan films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, The Village), and I tried to use some of the same techniques in my stories that he did in those films—namely hidden and layered meanings for extra depth or taking a mundane or inconsequential event and turning it into something profound and very meaningful for a specific person.

Other stories are just my attempt at trying something completely different on purpose and hoping they worked. I think most of them do, and I hope you find this collection entertaining and worth the read. In the end, it's interesting to myself to go back and read all these stories and wonder what the hell I was thinking when I wrote them.

So check it out - it's free.  If you like it, also check out Bonebearer and kindly spread the word.  Thanks.

How to Easily Format an eBook [3] Convert / Verification

This is the 3rd post in my tutorial about formatting an eBook for Kindle or Nook. You can read the first post about overall text formatting here. You can read the second post about title pages and a table of contents here. This post deals with the final step, converting your text into the requisite eBook file for Amazon or B&N and verifying it.

Once all the formatting and features are finished, you are ready to convert your file into an eBook file. For Kindle you can use .mobi and for Nook you can use .epub. You can create both from the same initial Word file, so the entire process is very easy.

Save as Filtered HTML

The first step is to save your Word document as Filtered HTML. An eBook file is really nothing more than an HTML file, so by saving as one initially you've have done half of the work already. Saving as Filtered HTML preserves all the formatting of the Word document, but removes much of the tags that Word/Office use for their specific functionality, cutting down on file size and tags that have no place in an HTML file.

To do this, merely do a "Save As" in Word (F12) and in the Save as type dropdown at the bottom, select "Web Page, Filtered."

Below that dropdown, to the right, you'll see a tag called "Title" (which might say Add a Title next to it, or already have a title from your file in it). Make sure this is set to the title of your book.  Select and change it if necessary.

When saving, save it two times – one with a filename that denotes it for Kindle, and one for Nook. That way you can convert each one separately in Calibre without any issues. If you want, update the type of edition in the Copyright Page for each to denote that one is the Kindle Edition and one is the Nook Edition.

Once saved, you can move on to conversion.

Calibre

The software I've used to convert my books is Calibre. You can find out all about it on the Calibre website, calibre-ebook.com. It can be used as an eBook manager if you so desire, but I only use it to convert files. It's very easy to do, and it has the added bonus of being free. The conversion discussed in this tutorial will only use Calibre.

First of all, download and install Calibre. Once done and the program is opened on your computer, you'll notice that there are a lot of options and it may be a bit overwhelming. No worries, there are only a few steps you need to take.

Add/Update Your Book

The first step is to merely add your book to the list in Calibre. Click the "Add Books" button at the upper-left and navigate to and select the HTML file for your book. If you have more than one HTML file (if you saved one for Kindle vs. Nook), then add each separately. Anything added will appear on the eBook list in the middle of the main window, like so:

From there, you'll need to update your book settings so that everything is set for when you convert the file. Highlight the book in the list and select the "Edit Metadata" button on the toolbar at the top, or right-click and do the same thing. Either way, the Edit Metadata dialog will appear:

Make sure to update the Author(s) and Author sort textboxes appropriately. The Title and Title sort should be set, but update them if they are not. I believe the sort is only used in the Calibre list, but it doesn't hurt to be accurate with them.

This is also where you are going to attach the cover for the book. For publishing on Amazon or B&N, I suggest having two sizes of your cover: 600x800 and 180x240. The first will be used in the eBook itself, while the other can be used for uploading to the Amazon and B&N websites. In Calibre, select "Browse" in the Change cover section and navigate to your 600x800 version.

Also, remember to update the Date and Published fields to denote when you actually created/published the eBook file. Click "OK" when you are ready to save the updates.

That's really all you need to update on the file. Now you are ready to convert.

File Conversion

Merely select your book in the list and click "Convert" on the toolbar. It will bring up a Convert dialog, and if you already did all the updates mentioned in the previous section, there's only one thing you'll need to change. In the upper-right corner, there is a dropdown for Output format. Change this to the desired format – MOBI for Kindle, EPUB for Nook.

Once your desired format is selected, click "OK" to convert. It will take a handful of seconds to process. Once done, you can find your final file in the book's folder wherever you designated the Calibre Library to be on your file system (during installation of the program). That is the file you will use when submitting to either Amazon or B&N.

Verification / Quality Assurance

Before you submit, however, you should always check the file in the target eReader to make sure it appears as you want it to. Generally, if it looks good on Kindle, the Nook version will look just as good.

I do most of my checking on Kindle, since I actually own one. You can easily copy your file to your Kindle by merely plugging the USB cord that comes with your Kindle into your computer. Copy the .mobi file and paste it into the high-level Kindle directory where all the other books on your Kindle are. Disconnect the Kindle, turn it on and check out your book.

For help on transferring files to your Kindle, check here.

If you don't have a Kindle handy, you can easily check using the Kindle Previewer program, which can be downloaded here. It's a simple program that will open any compatible file so you can see how it would appear on a Kindle.  Be aware that this is not the Kindle reader app for PC - you cannot add a custom book to that app.  If you want to look at it on your PC or Mac, you'll need to download the Previewer application.

Change the font style or size. Test out the Table of Contents and the links there. Make sure all your special pages (Title Page, Section/Part Breaks, etc) look sufficient. Nothing will look that good in super-large fonts, so don't worry about those; just test the smaller fonts that most people will use.

Another important thing to check is whether the paragraph indents are working properly (based on the steps taken in the first post of this tutorial). Unfortunately, the only way to really know if all the formatting is okay is to actually read through the entire book on your eReader, making note of each instance that needs to be fixed (I do a final reading in this fashion, using the Note feature of the Kindle to mark areas for adjustment).

To test on Nook, I merely used the Nook app on PC and my Android handset. You can find all the versions here. Nook functions pretty much the same way – if it looks good on Kindle and the Table of Contents work, chances are it will work on Nook as well. But it's a good idea to try it out on at least one version of the Nook app (or the Nook itself, if you have one).

Next Steps

All that's left is to get them published on Amazon or B&N. I'll leave how you do that up to you... but hopefully someone has found these tutorials helpful in some way. Post a comment if you have any questions.

Shameless promotion: If you want to see how this all looks in final eBook form, download a free sample of my book in Kindle or Nook formats. You could also try reading it as well. ;)

How to Easily Format an eBook [2] Title Pages / Table of Contents

This is the 2nd post in my tutorial about formatting an eBook for Kindle or Nook. You can read the first post about overall text formatting here. This post deals with Title Pages and the Table of Contents.

Once you have the basic text ready to go (according to the first part of this tutorial), you'll need to add any extra pages like a Title Page, a Copyright Page, Part/Section Pages, etc. Essentially anything that you want in your eBook that is not part of the normal text. For my eBooks, I created all of the above, including a Table of Contents.

Title Page

The title page in your eBook is essentially the first page after the cover. Usually it just says the book title, the author's name and any other info (like a tagline, publisher, etc) that you deem absolutely necessary. But for the most part, it should just be the title and author.

For my novel Bonebearer, all I did was this:

Very simple. On the Word page, start the title around 7-8 lines down from the top. Put a few spaces on each line to ensure that they remain after you convert it to the eBook format. Try to keep it tight overall and only in the first half of the page so it looks good with the most common font sizes a reader may choose for their eReader. Feel free to use larger size fonts (as compared to your normal text). When converted to an eBook the size differences between the two will remain.

Also remember to keep it on its own separate page, with page breaks between it and nearby pages. Page breaks force a new page in eReaders, so don't forget to use them when needed.

Copyright Page

There are a lot of different ways you can do this. One is to just pick up some of the books you own, look at their copyright pages and imitate them in some form or fashion (that is what I did). Add credits for any additional contributors. Go ahead and put a disclaimer about it being a "work of fiction" and that it's copyrighted, etc etc. Put it on a separate page entirely, with page breaks, like you did with the title page.

Technically you already own the copyright from the moment you create it, further reinforced by fixing your work in some tangible medium (an eBook); you don't have to file for copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office unless you want to bring a lawsuit against someone for infringement. So that's up to you.

For more info on copyright, please check copyright.gov. It's a good idea to read through the FAQs so you're familiar with the basics before publishing anything.

Yet... why bother with a copyright page? Well, because it looks professional, that's why. Plus, they are not hard to make. The extra effort will make it look like you care (which you do, right?).

Here is the copyright page from my novel, Bonebearer:

You will notice I added things like "Cover art by" and an author website. I also have an ISBN, which is something you may or may not have. It is not required in order to sell an eBook, but if you're really trying to be serious about selling your writing, it's a good idea to have one so your work can be identified for a few reasons (as taken from here):

· for the purposes of trading through conventional channels
· for search and discovery in publicly available retailer databases
· for item/product-level sales reporting (whether for royalties or for sales data reporting)

Whether you want to get an ISBN or not is up to you. They even suggest having a different one for each eBook format, but I have used the same one for both my Kindle (.mobi) and Nook (.epub) formats of Bonebearer. Read more about ISBNs on isbn.org.

Part / Section Pages

If your text is broken into discreet parts – i.e. Part 1, Part 2, etc – then you should make them on separate pages (with page breaks) as usual. Format it however you wish, but follow the same basic techniques mentioned for the title page: start it a few lines down the page (with spaces on the blank lines to force them to appear in the eReader format), use different sizes/styles of font as needed, and try to keep it in the first half of the page.

I would suggest using a large size font so that the reader knows it's a part / section break. Here's an example of a part break from my novel, Bonebearer:

I have a quote for each part in that novel. You might just have Part 1: Part Name or whatever. As usual, keep it simple and elegant. No need for crazy pictures or too much variation in fonts.

Don't forget that each part / section page needs to be on a separate page with page breaks separating them from the text. It's important!

Table of Contents

Here is one of the most critical parts of your eBook. A properly done Table of Contents will enable the reader to jump around in the book easily and it also meets the standards that Amazon or B&N recommend for their eBook formats. With one in place, it will also display page numbers in the Kindle format.

To create your Table of Contents, you must add a bookmark in each spot that you want to put on the list. So if you have chapters, add a bookmark at the beginning of each chapter. This can be a tedious manual process if your file is quite large and you have a lot of chapters, but you'll only have to do it once and it will be worth it. Why? Because it will look professional and it shows you care about your final product.

To add a bookmark in Word, first place the cursor where you want it, then select Insert -> Bookmark on the toolbar / ribbon:

This will bring up the Bookmark dialog. Type the name of your bookmark in Bookmark name (overwrite whatever is in there, it may show an existing one). I usually do something simple like "C01" (Chapter 1) or "P01" (Part 1) so I can easily identify it later. Click "Add" to add the bookmark. Go through your entire file and add each new bookmark one at a time.

Once that is done, add a new page near the beginning of your file, typically after the copyright page and before the text begins. This will be your Table of Contents page. Format it however you wish and type out the chapter names. Don't bother with page numbers or the full justification that you might see in a physical book. Just simply list everything.

When your list is complete, highlight a chapter name. Right-click and select "Hyperlink." In the Insert Hyperlink dialog, you'll have the option to add a few different types of links. You want to select Place in this Document, then select the name of the bookmark you made for that chapter. Like so:

Click "OK" and the link will be added. Your highlighted text now looks like a link you might see on a web page, but instead it will jump to the bookmark (and thus the chapter) in your text. Repeat this for every chapter name in the Table of Contents.

Yes, it is tedious. But you only have to do it once!

Next Steps

At this point your file should be completely formatted, along with all necessary features for the final eBook. The last step is to convert your eBook to the proper formats and check it in an eReader (or eReader application) to make sure everything is kosher. Check the link below for the continuation.

Next: Convert in Calibre / Verification

Shameless promotion: If you want to see how this all looks in final eBook form, download a free sample of my book in Kindle or Nook formats. You could also try reading it as well. ;)

How to Easily Format an eBook [1] Text Formatting

Last month I published my first eBook on Amazon (Bonebearer). I spent quite a bit of time beforehand making sure that the file met the standards and criteria required by Amazon so it wouldn't get rejected. I read through their formatting guidelines and did a lot of research, but in the end the process I used was very simple and doesn't require any knowledge of HTML or CSS (although it never hurts to know the basics). My process is outlined below for both Kindle and Nook.

All you need to do this is a recent version of Microsoft Word (2007 or higher is recommended) and an eBook format converter like Calibre (which I recommend, it's free and very easy to use). The basic steps are:

1. Text Formatting
2. Title Pages / Table of Contents
3. Convert in Calibre

Each step will be covered in a separate blog post. This tutorial works best when your eBook is just simple text, like a novel. If you're doing something with a lot of pictures or special formatting, this tutorial would help with final conversions, but not with making sure special formatting is done right.

Remember, this is a simple method that works for me. There are obviously different ways to go about this, but hopefully this will help someone.

Text Formatting

I use Microsoft Word for all of my word processing. I read about other popular authors shunning Word and basically saying it sucks, but I've never really understood what exactly their problem with the software is, other than those authors being anti-Windows by principle (Piers Anthony, for example). I use it all the time and have no problems with it. What you can't do with built-in functions, you can always automate using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).

Anyway, formatting text is easy. There are only a few things you really need to pay attention to. Before you do any of the steps below, though, MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR ORIGINAL FILE. Never go through this process on your only copy.

The font of your text doesn't make a difference, since Kindle or Nook will ignore the font (the reader controls the font he/she wants to see). When formatting, I switch it to something easy to read, like Times New Roman, 12 pt. The important things you need to address are spacing, tabs, font style, special characters, page breaks (for chapters/sections) and chapter headings. We'll go through each below.

Spacing

Select all the text (excluding title pages and pages that don't have straight text) and change all paragraph spacing to a value of 1.0 and make sure it doesn't add a space before or after each paragraph. I believe this kind of spacing is ultimately ignored, but I like removing it all just in case.

Tabs / Indents

eBooks are generally going to ignore tabs, so if you've got them in your file already, it's best to remove them and replace them with fixed indenting. Even if you don't think you have any tabs in your file, do this anyway just in case. To remove tabs, highlight the entire text, and do a Find & Replace (Ctrl+H). Make sure to click "More" to display more options. A tab character is listed under the "Special" dropdown – select it there for the Find what option, or just type in (^t). Replace with should be blank. Like this:

Select "Replace All" and the tabs go away. Now, you must replace them with indents. As long as you've typed your document like most people do (use word wrap and only line break after each paragraph), this will be easy. Highlight all the text again (excluding title pages, etc, as usual), then just move the "First Line Indent" marker on the ruler (circled in the picture below) over about a half inch (less if you really want, anything larger than 0.5" looks like crap when people read the eBook with large fonts):

Alternatively, you can just go into the Paragraph options in Word and under the Indentation section, make sure Special = "First line" and By = 0.5". Like so:

Font Style (Bold, Italics, etc)

If you type up your document the way you might for a publishing house, where the only font style in the file is underlining (to denote italics in a published book), you should replace it so that what you see in Word is how you want it to display in the eReader. So if you want something italicized, change all instances to italics. A typical novel will only use italics. If you must have something bold (perhaps a chapter header, addressed later), then bold it.

To make these changes, do a simple Find & Replace, as mentioned in the Tab section above. Instead of replacing tab characters, though, you'll be replacing font styles (yes, you can do this in Word... easily). Ctrl+H to get to Find & Replace, select "More" to reveal more options and in the Replace section, use the "Format" dropdown and select "Font" to select the style you need to find or replace.

So in my example, replacing underline with italics: in the Font dialog, the only things you should change are Font style and Underline style.

For Find what, you should have these settings:
   Font style = Regular
   Underline style = Normal underline style, the thinnest unbroken line

For Replace with, you should have these settings:
   Font style = Italic
   Underline style = (none)

Always make sure the Preview window shows the desired look before continuing.  In the end, this is what you want to see in the Find and Replace dialog:

Select "Replace All" and viola, the formatting in your entire document has been changed. Easy.

Special Characters

Another thing you'll want to look out for are things like double en dashes (--) which should be turned into em dashes (—), or the horizontal ellipsis character (...) that Word likes to replace your normal three periods with if you have it set to AutoCorrect.

For double en dashes, these should appear if you were writing in plain text for potential publishing or manuscript submission.  They are easy to fix.  Just do another Find and Replace (make sure the formatting criteria is removed from the last step), type -- for the Find what and for Replace with select the em dash special character in the "Special" dropdown.

For horizontal ellipses, if you typed your manuscript in plain text it shouldn't be a problem, but if it was in your AutoCorrect list, do another Find and Replace.  Copy the horizontal ellipsis character into Find what and type three periods in Replace with.

It's always a good idea to check the AutoCorrect list in the Word Options, to ensure that it doesn't automatically replace things that could be problematic later.  Even better, just turn it off when you're working on your text.

Page Breaks

If your text is broken up into chapters, sections or parts that are clearly demarcated, you should put a page break at the beginning of each. This will help for when you later add a Table of Contents and it just looks better in the eReader when you jump to that chapter or section.

Page breaks are easy to add, just page down through your document and at the spot where the break needs to occur, place the cursor and select Insert -> Page Break in the Word menu. You can also use the shortcut key of Ctrl+Return. Do this for every spot where you want the content to start on a new page: chapter, section, part, etc.

How you want to do it is up to you – logically you'd want it for every chapter or section, like you would find in a professionally published book. If you're publishing an eBook I'm going to assume you like to read, so just reference some books of your own.

Chapter Headings

How you want to do chapter headings (i.e. chapter name) is also up to you, but you should at least format them differently than the main text so that it's obvious that they're chapter headings. There are a couple of different ways you can do them. I suggest you keep it simple – there's no need to go crazy with graphics or any of that, because that just makes for more formatting that could go wrong somewhere along the line.

The simplest way is to do an italicized header, without an indent (my personal preference). If you've set up the fixed indenting throughout your file (as noted in the Tabs / Indents section), then whenever you press Return/Enter (carriage return) the new line will automatically be indented. To remove it, just slide the First Line Indent marker on the ruler back to 0 (opposite of how we created the indents earlier).  If you look back at the second picture in this post, you'll see where the chapter header is not indented, but each paragraph is.

Here's an example of a simple chapter header:

6: The Northwest Fires

Or if you have chapters without names, just do something like:

Chapter 10

If you want to center it, merely use the Center Text option in Word on your selection (or Ctrl+E). The center formatting will carry through to the final eBook.

If you want your chapter header to be partway down the page, place a few carriage returns before the header and put a space or two on each blank line to ensure that the blank line remains. However – don't put too many blank lines before the header, as it may look goofy in a large font on the eReader. Generally this won't be a problem, because I'd wager most people don't read eBooks with gigantic font - and ultimately there's nothing you can do about that - but it doesn't hurt to keep it in mind.

If you want bigger letters or all caps for the first few words (like you sometimes see in a published novel), format your text accordingly. I personally haven't felt the need to do that yet.

Next Steps

At this point the text of your file should be formatted properly. The next step is to add a Table of Contents, along with a Title Page and any other ancillary pages you might need (section / part breaks, copyright info, etc). Check the link below for the continuation.

Next: Title Pages / Table of Contents

Shameless promotion: If you want to see how this all looks in final eBook form, download a free sample of my book in Kindle or Nook formats. You could also try reading it as well.  ;)

Bonebearer on Nook

I’ve released Bonebearer in the ePub format, on the Barnes & Noble site, for use with the Nook eReader. You can find it here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bonebearer-brad-murgen/1105679421?ean=2940013395688&itm=1&usri=brad%2bmurgen

Same price and everything, $0.99. Check it out, it’s only a buck.