Smashwords Style Guide - How to Format Your Ebook (Smashwords Guides 1)

The Smashwords Style Guide has helped indie authors produce and publish over 130,000 high-quality ebooks. 200,000 copies of the Smashwords Style Guide have downloaded!

This guide offers simple step-by-step instructions to create and format an ebook using Microsoft Word.

The Smashwords Style Guide is required reading for any author who wants to distribute their book via Smashwords to major ebook retailers such as the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel.

Authors and publishers who don't yet use Smashwords can still benefit from the Guide. It provides detailed information on how ebook formatting is different from print formatting, how to create a reflowable ebook, and it offers step by step illustrated instructions on how to tame the beast of Microsoft Word.

INSIDE THE SMASHWORDS STYLE GUIDE

GETTING STARTED

Welcome to Smashwords!
Do-it-yourself, or hire help?
Good formatting examples
What Smashwords publishes, what we don’t publish
Five common formatting mistakes to avoid
How Smashwords publishes books
How Smashwords distributes books
How ebook formatting is different from print formatting
How we convert your book into multiple ebook formats
The three secrets to ebook formatting
How to avoid (and fix) AutoVetter errors
Introduction to Meatgrinder conversion system
Your required source file
Understanding the different ebook formats

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

FORMATTING

Pre-Prep
Making Word Behave
Step 1: Make a back up
Step 2: Activate Word’s Show/Hide
Step 3: Turn off Word’s “AutoCorrect” and “AutoFormat” features
Step 4: Eliminate text boxes
Step 5: The Nuclear Method

Formatting
Step 6: Unify Manuscript around Normal paragraph style
Step 7: Managing and modifying paragraph styles, fonts
Step 7a. How to choose the best paragraph separation method (first line indent or block?)
Step 7b: How to implement your chosen paragraph separation method
Step 7b-a: How to define a proper first line indent
Step 7b-b: How to define trailing “after” space for block paragraphs
Step 7b-c: Special tips for poetry, cookbooks and learning materials
Step 7b-d: How to define proper line spacing
Step 8: Check your normalized text
Step 9: Why you should never use tabs or the space bar for indents
Step 10: Managing paragraph returns
Step 11: Managing hyperlinks
Step 12: Designating chapter breaks, page breaks, section breaks
Step 13: Working with images
Step 14: Text justification
Step 14a: Centering text
Step 15: Managing font sizes
Step 16: Style formatting, symbols and glyphs
Step 17: Headers and footers
Step 18: Margins, page sizes and indents
Step 19: Add the Heading style to your Chapter headers (optional)

Building Navigation
Step 20: Building navigation into the manuscript
Step 20a: Creating the NCX
Step 20b: Creating the linked Table of Contents
Step 20c: Advanced link building (Footnotes, Endnotes)
Step 20d: Troubleshooting and testing

Front Matter
Step 21: Front matter
Step 21a: Blurbs (optional)
Step 21b: Title and copyright page (required!)
Step 21c: Add a Smashwords license statement below copyright page

The End of Your Book
Step 22: The end of your book

POST-FORMATTING
Step 23: Preparing your cover image
Step 24: Review requirements for Premium Catalog distribution

Uploading Your Book to Smashwords
Step 25: How to upload your book
Step 26: How AutoVetter works
Step 27: After you publish – check your work
Step 27a: Check for EPUBCHECK compliance (important!)

How to Market Your Book
Step 28: Read the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide (also available at Amazon)
Step 29 Read The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success (available at Amazon)

Helpful Resources
Send Feedback
About the Author

APPENDIX
Keyboard shortcuts (save hours with these tricks!)

Revision: June 16, 2012