The following guest post from Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader is going to help you. Big time. You’re going to find four mistakes that you might be making with your book covers… and what to do instead. 

When it comes to getting your next reader, book covers are the most important part of a book. They are the one part of the book that a reader is sure to see, and covers are often both the first and last time that a potential reader will consider your book.

Book covers are critically important, and yet both publishers and authors are still getting them wrong. I was browsing Twitter the other day when Mike Cane sent me a link to a tweet by a book lover who was upset over how a cover looked on a Kobo Clara HD.

 

Can we ask just take a moment and appreciate how much a beautifully foolish endeavor by @hankgreen ‘s cover just doesn’t work in black and white. The tragedy of cheap eReaders everywhere! #abeautifullyfoolishendeavor pic.twitter.com/iBgVupPZZ8

— Jon Champagne (@jayseejc) August 11, 2020

They’re right, it does look bad. But the thing is, the cover doesn’t look that much better in color. I think it is nearly illegible.

The real problem here is that the publisher went with a cover design that would catch your eye if you saw it on a shelf in a bookstore, but is also nearly illegible on most screens. 

I’d like to help you avoid making the same mistake, so here are a few points to consider when choosing your next book cover.

FOUR WAYS TO SCREW UP YOUR BOOK COVER

1 // Don’t make your genre immediately clear at a glance. 

I know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but everyone does. We make snap judgments based on looking at a cover for all of half a second, and one of the factors we consider is whether the book we’re considering is in a genre we read.

Each genre has its own specific details that readers will use to identify a book’s genre. This happens on an almost instinctual level. If a potential reader thinks your book is in a different genre, or even worse if they can’t tell what genre the book is in, they will pass on your book before even reading the title or the blurb.

When designing your cover, before to test it with beta readers. Ask them to tell you the genre, and have them guess the story and main character. If they get details wrong, you might want to redesign the cover.

 

2 // Don’t consider how the cover will look on various screens. 

While your marketing plan may be built on selling a lot of print copies, the simple truth is most potential readers are going to see it on a screen first. Most book sales occur online, and that is true for both print and digital. (And even if the next copy of your book is sold in a bookstore, there’s still a fair chance that the reader first discovered the book online.)

Luckily for you, this is a really easy thing to test. One of the steps in designing a book cover is to show it to beta testers online, so all you have to do is listen to their feedback for clues that suggest that they had trouble seeing your book cover. They might not think to say that a given cover is illegible, but if they express difficulty in making out details, that could be a sign that the design doesn’t work on a screen.

 

3 // Don’t look at your cover at the thumbnail size most retailers will display. 

Speaking of buying books, you should also make sure that your book cover is still appealing when it is shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp. If someone finds your book in a search on Amazon, chances are it will look like this:

Or it might appear as a sponsored product (if you run ads) or under one of the many-changing carousels that Amazon uses, like customers also bought or books you may like, shown here:

 

As you can see in the screenshots, each cover thumbnail is next to the book’s title, so you don’t really have to worry about making that legible when the cover is a thumbnail. You do however have to make sure the cover is appealing, and that readers can correctly identify the book’s genre.

 

4 // Don’t look at your cover in grayscale. 

eReaders like the Kindle are not as popular today as they were eight or ten years ago, but there are still a lot of readers who use their ereader everyday. You need to make sure your cover looks good in grayscale on an epaper screen.

Luckily for you, the Kindle and most other ereaders are actually very good at automatically converting color images to grayscale. A few months back I happened to have a reason to test how the Kindle handled highly detailed astronomy photos. I found that they were quite recognizable even though I did not take any steps to prep them for the Kindle’s E-ink screen. 

Even so, you should still test your book cover on (at least) the Kindle so that you can make sure it is legible.

 

FINAL THOUGHTS ON BOOK COVERS…

Nate has given some great food for thought about covers. They’re the first way a reader comes in contact with your book. Our brains process visual images in less than the time it takes to blink. Thirteen milliseconds, in fact. So if your cover is not painting a clear picture QUICKLY of your genre in a way that’s attractive and will work on various screens and sizes, you’re missing an opportunity!

Don’t make these four mistakes with your book covers!

ABOUT NATE HOFFELDER

Nate has been helping people fix broken tech since 2010. He repairs and maintains WordPress sites, and acts as a virtual IT department for authors. He also blogs about the Kindle and indie publishing. You may have heard his site, The Digital Reader, mentioned on news sites such as the NYTimes or Forbes.

This post is going to dive into how to get the most out of free book promotions or 99-cent sales (which will include KDP countdown deals). You’ll walk away with a better idea of the strategy behind these kinds of promotions!

 

LISTEN TO EPISODE 189- HOW TO UTILIZE FREE BOOK PROMOTIONS OR 99-CENT SALES

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app!

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Two of the tools used frequently by authors are free book promotions or 99-cent sales. If you’re exclusive to Kindle by being in their Kindle Select program, you’ll have a free book promotion or a Kindle Countdown deal per each enrollment period. (The enrollment period is 90 days.) If you’re NOT inside KDP Select, you can manually change prices or use a promotion tool from within your dashboard.

But just making a book free or running a sale is NOT ENOUGH. There are so many free books and books on sale in the various retailers that you really need to have a strategy behind making this choice and a promotional plan in place.

• Related post: Are BookBub Featured Deals Worth It? 

YOUR WHY BEHIND THE PROMOTION

There are multiple reasons why you might be running a sale or a free promotion on your book. Different goals might mean different strategies. Here are some different reasons you might be running a free promo or sale:

Discoverability – A free promotion or sale is a great way to introduce new readers to you and your books. Both can help your book go up in the ranks to be more visible on retailers as well.

Sales – Free promotions and sales often have the added effect of selling more of that book.

KU Page Reads – If your book is in Kindle Select, that means readers who have the Kindle Unlimited subscription service can choose to borrow your book rather than pick it up and “buy” it for free or 99 cents. So you can see increases in page reads (which you still get paid for) if someone checks it out on KU rather than buying.

Boosting overall sales – These promos and sales can help hook the readers into a longer series and help the sales of your backlist.

WHEN YOU SHOULDN’T RUN A FREE BOOK PROMOTION

I found out the hard way that free book promotions aren’t that helpful without more books in the series or in your backlist. (To be clear on those terms–I mean other books in that same series when I mention series, and when I talk about backlist, I’m talking about other unrelated books you’ve written.) 

There are tons of freebie-seekers out there. Often they’ll stockpile books and won’t read them. This doesn’t help with discoverability, as they may not ever “discover” you. Which means that while free is great for finding new readers, it’s not a magic cure-all. And if they DO love you, but you have no other books, they might totally forget about you before your next books come out.

Without having other books in a series or a larger backlist, there’s no solid way to recoup the cost of your promotions. (I’m going to talk about investing money in a moment.) With a series and a backlist, you’ll have other books people can buy to help offset any advertising costs.

I would recommend waiting until you’ve got at least two other books in the series or at least a handful of other books in your backlist before running a free promo. Not everyone writes in a series, but if you DO, then I’d save that free book promotion for the launch of a new book in the series or when you have a new book on preorder.

WHY YOU SHOULD PAY FOR PROMOTIONS ON A FREE BOOK OR SALE

As I’ve mentioned, there are tons of books for free at any given time on any given retailer. If you don’t do something to boost the visibility of your free or sale book, you’re not likely to reach any of your goals.

With a few paid promotions, your book can go from a dozen downloads to thousands, which puts your book on more readers’ devices and will help you achieve those goals. I’ve also found that I make more sales the days following a free promo, likely due to people opening the emails from the promo sites a few days later and picking up your book when it’s no longer on sale or free.

The following screenshot shows my income for December 2018. That big spike in sales? That was the day AFTER my free promotion where I paid under $150 in promos. I made $340 the next day.

 

(Note: This was one of the highest day-after sales I’ve had, but many of my free months look like this on the graph. To do well, your book also has to be on point for the genre in terms of the cover and blurb.) 

This screenshot comes from that next month. I wanted to show both together, as my highest day here was also the day after a free day. BUT I had a new release. Look at the previous pic and you can see the sales starting to pick up from that new release. I was also running FB ads at that time to the new release. So the highest day STILL was the day after a freebie, but it didn’t look like as much of a spike as I had other paid promos on a new release launch.

While it seems counterintuitive to PAY for promotions on a cheap or free book, I’ll often more than make my money back on the next day or few days with that book or within the series or my backlist. Without promotions, your book won’t be found, won’t be downloaded, and it’s really going to feel like a waste.

WHERE SHOULD YOU PROMOTE YOUR FREE/SALE BOOKS?

I don’t have a cultivated list here, but there are some great other sites that compile effective sites for promotion. Check out:

• Kindlepreneur’s List of Book Promo Sites
• Reedsy’s List of Book Promo Sites
• Nicholas Erik’s List of Book Promo Sites

One tool I really like is called KDROI. It’s by the maker of KDSPY, which I also loves, and is a chrome extension that lets you go onto your book’s page on Amazon, click a button, and submit your free or 99 cent deal automatically to sites that have a listing for free.

I’m an affiliate for this program, which you can snag for under $50: GET KDROI!

Below is a screenshot of what it looks like in action. A few clicks and BOOM. It will submit to a number of sites all on its own.

I would highly recommend making a spreadsheet to track your free days and promotions, especially as you’re testing out which sites have the best results and work best for your genre.

WHAT PROMOTION SITES TO AVOID

As a note, I almost NEVER pay to promote books with sites that only do social media shares. Overall, email sells books. Social media typically… doesn’t.

Sometimes I’ll check these sites who email me bragging about their 200k Twitter followers and how they’ll tweet my book 400 times. I click on the books they’re promoting on Twitter and check the rank. I’m NEVER impressed. So, I only pay for sites that send emails.

It’s also wise to check Facebook groups you’re in to see if they have a curated list or to ask other authors in your genre which sites work best for them. It’s not always the same across the board.

OTHER WAYS TO PROMOTE

If you don’t have tons of money to dedicate to a promotion, consider working with other authors. You can all email for each other on the same day, or set up a sales page on a website or through Bookfunnel or Story Origin for a limited time with all the books.

You can ask for authors to swap with you on the dates of a sale, just as you would ask for swaps with a new release. Or, you can set up a Facebook group swap with other authors. If they post for you in their author groups on the date of your promo, you can swap back and do the same for them when they have a sale or promo.

There are thousands of FB groups that allow promotion. Most of these are what I like to call link graveyards where authors drop links to die, but some are legit reader groups where people are looking for books to read. Create a nifty graphic for your free promo. Post in those groups. It doesn’t cost anything but time, though the effectiveness may not be fantastic.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON UTILIZING FREE DAYS AND SALES

These are still great tools, though I’ve seen the effectiveness wane as I’ve been around longer. Why? Back in 2018, I was new. My books hadn’t been seen or read by tons of people, so it may have been more of a novelty. Now, readers may already have purchased my books. Some of them have already been free once before.

I tend to run some kind of sale or promotion every month of the year because I have a big backlist. I’m either releasing a new book, putting a book up for free, or running a sale. Possibly a combination. All of these activities keep your books moving and selling, which keeps them alive and continues to sell your backlist.

Don’t be afraid to run sales, and if you’re concerned about the perceived value of your books, think of the long game. One free book could bring you thousands of new readers who buy more and more of your books. It’s definitely a strategy worth trying, as long as it’s part of a strategy and you have a plan for promotion.

 

In this post I’m going to talk about how to keep consistent book sales over time. You might also want to look at my post, Sustaining Your Book Sales… and Yourself, as well as my latest episode about getting a Bookbub ad, which will tie into this information. 

So … you’ve written a book. Congratulations! For real. It’s a big undertaking, and you should be proud of yourself.

Then you launch the book–time for more celebration! (And if you need a simple launch plan, check out my post on a Simple Launch Framework.) Launching really is hard work. Definitely something to feel good about.

And then comes the sales slump.

Or maybe your launch didn’t go BOOM. It just quietly happened … with a handful of sales to show for it.

How in the world do you sell books and then keep sustaining those book sales over time? Because the reality is this: if you don’t promote, your books will continue to fall in the rankings until they’re just lost in the Amazon (or whatever retailer) store. Let’s talk about how to combat that.

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188 – HOW TO KEEP CONSISTENT BOOK SALES

… and so on. I have a big calendar on the wall in my office, and I try to plan one big thing per month that I put some funds towards, combined with the daily lower-spend ads I’m usually running in the background.

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WHAT IF I DON’T DO ANYTHING TO PROMOTE MY BOOKS?

I mean, it’s totally a choice to put your book out there and hope people find and read it. Maybe they will. Maybe your book will have JUST the right keywords and somehow word of mouth gets things moving and it seems to sell on its own. I do know authors who put out a book and … that’s about it.

But they’re unicorns. That’s not the norm. And usually it means they’ve built a reputation and a readership that shows up.

Without some kind of promotional plan over time, your books won’t continue to sell.

It’s also harder when you have fewer books. Those books may need a stronger, harder launch push. Or you might really need to figure out and test ads to keep effective ads on them because you won’t have the option for BOOMS with other books if you don’t have all that many books.

Getting one BookBub Featured Deal won’t make your sales last forever. It will have an impact. But it will die down if you don’t continue to take actions that create consistent book sales over time. Those sales every day add up.

Continue to grow your readership, because those people will buy your books. Not one book, but ALL YOUR BOOKS. So, while you’re investing in your BOOMS and blooms, also invest time and money into your reader base, whether you’re doing that via email (my big focus) or in a Facebook group or somewhere else.

WHAT IF YOU HAVE NO BUDGET?

I hear this a lot and I really, really get it. If that’s you, I know this is frustrating. I will say that when I started out, I didn’t have much budget. I was making other money in other ways (primarily through this podcast, affiliate sales, and courses), so I put ALL that money toward my fiction. I also put all the money I made BACK into the business.

I bootstrapped and got the best cheapest covers I could and spend maybe $100-200 on paid email promos, which are the best bang for your buck if you don’t know how to run Facebook or Amazon ads. That money MORE than came back to me, by the way. It got my new books visible as a new author. That DOES matter. I did newsletter swaps and Facebook group things and whatever free things I could.

The money started to grow over time, and over time, I increased my budget. I also lost money as I figured out what worked for me and what was a waste of time.

Start small. Start where you can. Do what you need to in order to have SOME money to invest in your books. It’s really going to be hard to make any money if you have none to invest. But take heart, you can start small.

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Want to start small with FB ads?

You can snag my FB ads minicourse for $75. It’s got a two-hour intro workshop, plus multiple tutorials on how to set up Facebook ads on a budget, and a case study watching an ad over the course of a week to see how the ranking and sales went.

I recently secured my first BookBub Featured Deal! There are a few options with BookBub–ads, new release featured deals, preorder alerts, and featured deals. Featured deals must be applied for and are the most expensive and most effective–or at least, they have been in the past. Are they still effective? Let’s take a look!

Applying for a BookBub Featured Deal can feel sometimes like an exercise in futility. And frustration. Especially when you see some of the books that DO get chosen. Books that might have fewer reviews, weird or bad covers, or stinky blurbs.

After feeling the frustration and mostly forgetting to apply, I applied for book 1 and book 2 of my beach series. I got one rejection (for book 1) and one acceptance (book 2)! I’m going to break down the expenses, what else I did, and how the numbers played out.

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LISTEN TO EPISODE 187 – Behind the Scenes of a BookBub Featured Deal

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app

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I’m going to break this down for you in honest terms and with some facts and figures. For things I don’t KNOW (like how to secure a Bookbub Featured Deal), I’ll give you my best guesses and let you know that they’re guesses.

HOW TO SECURE A BOOKBUB FEATURED DEAL

To apply for a Bookbub Featured Deal, you need to apply within 31 days of the date. You’ll simply sign into Bookbub, then look at the bottom to Submit a New Deal.

Common advice is to make the deal competitive–99 cents or free. Books that are wide (as in, available on multiple retailers, not just Amazon) tend to have better chances, but books in Kindle Unlimited (exclusive to Amazon) do still secure deals. Professional covers and reviews are a part of it, though I’ve seen some meh covers and books with low reviews. If you get rejected, you’ll need to wait four weeks to submit that title again.

• Bookbub has some great tips for submission that you can find HERE.
• And if you want the nitty-gritty specifics, you can look at those requirements HERE.

How did MY book get selected? 

I can’t say for SURE, but here are some of my thoughts.

COVER. I recently recovered my whole Sandover Beach series to have more pretty, traditional-style covers that are working really well for traditional and indies right now. They’re GORGEOUS. I was able to secure a great deal with a premade that I had built into a series of covers from Evelyne at Carpe Librum Book Designs. She’s fabulous!

WIDE vs KU. I’ve applied with my Kindle Unlimited, Amazon-exclusive books and not gotten a Bookbub. I’m guessing it helped that this series is available on other retailers like B&N, Nook, and Kobo.

NO RECENT SALES. My book 1 was not accepted, though to me it seems to make more sense to promote a first book in a series, but book 1 had a recent sale before I took it out of KU. Book 2 had no recent sales.

REVIEWS. I’m not sure if it had any bearing, but my book 1 had two low reviews. A one-star from someone who didn’t realize that the book had changed titles and purchased it twice. (As an author, it stinks, but sometimes we need to update books and people not on our email lists or FB groups may miss that memo!) The two-star review was from someone who apparently thought it was super boring. 😉

Overall, who knows. I think that these factors played a part, but otherwise, who knows? Do your best to listen to their guidelines. Keep submitting!

HOW TO AMP UP A FEATURED DEAL

Many people talk about stacking advertising around a BookBub. That may seem… wild. Since you’re already spending money, why spend more? But adding some other newsletter swaps or social shares, or even getting other paid promotions can help your book get visible and stay visible, earning you more income. This is called stacking ads.

What did I do to amp up my deal?

I didn’t have huge goals (like hitting a bestseller list) so I set up one promo the day before. I also set my book 1 to 99 cents. This helped my ranking for both books jump up so that when the BookBub hit, my ranking was already in a good place and got even better. Both my book one and book two broke the top 1000, with book two hitting 121 in the whole Amazon store, my best ranking for a book ever. It stayed there for the better part of day, which rocked. I was also #23 in the whole Barnes & Nobles store.

I didn’t have time to set up swaps, but I did ask for social shares and shared in the groups I’m in that allow promo, and in my own reader groups. I also paid to boost a FB post. Usually, I stick to ads, but I wanted to have a few different things going on at once. I had ads running, the FB boost, FB group shares, and I emailed my own list.

SO … WHAT WERE THE NUMBERS?

I’m just under a week out from the BookBub Featured deal. My sales have started to return back to a normal number already, so here’s a breakdown of how things went. First, for that one book, then the series, and then that pen name as a whole.

THE DAY OF THE DEAL

Cost of the Featured Deal: $480

Sale on Book Two on Amazon: $377

Sale of Book Two on Other Retailers: $235

Sales on Whole Series on Amazon: $698

Sales of Whole Series on Other Retailers: $303

Sales on ALL of My Books (not just this series): $1082

If you’re just looking at day one, there is barely a profit on the book that was featured. I spent $480 to make $612. But if you add in the whole series and then the books from my pen name (almost all of which got a bump), we’re seeing bigger numbers.

Let’s back up and go even wider to see the impact, including the day before, when I started my promo with the other, smaller promo sites.

 

A FULL SIX DAYS–STARTING THE DAY BEFORE

Cost of Bookbub (Featured Deal US & International in Christian Fiction): $480

Two other promotions: $90

Facebook Ads (which ran to the series): $219

Amazon Ads: $75

Total Expenses: $864

 

Total Sales on Book Two on Amazon: $597

Total Sales on Book Two on Other Retailers: $310

Total Sales on Whole Series on Amazon: $1487

Total Sales on Whole Series on Other Retailers: $495

Total Sales on ALL Books: $2576

TOTAL PROFIT: $1712

reminder- expenses: $864

 

How about the week before’s profit on all books for that pen name? Let’s just see what the norm is.

Total Expenses (Amazon & FB Ads): $282

Total Sales on ALL Books (all retailers): $894

TOTAL PROFIT: $612

reminder- expenses: $282

 

 

The margin of profit the week before was BETTER, though not by much. I made more money, but spent more to do it. Both weeks, my expenses were about half of the total profit. 

NOW, let’s scoot back and look at the bigger picture of the whole series, and then my pen name overall. 

As I mentioned, because this was book two, I figured making book one also 99 cents would help. It did. The other two books are $3.99 each and I did have the next preorder up, though Amazon hadn’t connected it to the series page, which hurt. I also have another related beach series. I ended up getting 23 preorders (at $3.99) on the fifth book in this series and 13 (at $4.99) for the related beach book.

The big thing that the money doesn’t show is the number of NEW READERS I have hopefully gained. I sold almost 2500 copies of my four beach books. That’s … massive. The week before, I sold a little over a hundred copies.

And while freebie seekers don’t always read the free books they download (there’s a whole stockpile mentality), people buying books seems to be more likely to read. I’ve seen already a handful of new reviews on the first two books.

WHAT IF YOU WANT TO HIT A BESTSELLER LIST?

I know some people hit the bestseller list with a BookBub. To clarify, I’m NOT talking about the bestselling books in smaller categories on Amazon, but something like the USA TODAY Bestseller’s List.

To hit something like that, you’ll need closer to 7,000-10,000 book sales, including at least 500 on one retailer other than Amazon. Those are the basic numbers people throw around, and based on the fact that I’ve hit one of those lists and am currently in a group aiming to hit, those ring true.

If you want to hit a bestseller list piggy-backing off a BookBub, you’ll need to stack a LOT more ads, ramp up your other ad income, and do a lot more to be visible. The “week” for that runs starting on Tuesday. So you’ll want to make sure you’re hitting on the right day as well. My BookBub was a Saturday, which I would GUESS is less effective overall, but for sure wouldn’t help me hit a list. (I wasn’t aiming or expecting to, for the record.)

MY BIG TAKEAWAYS…

BookBubs are big, splashy, and can make your book look pretty awesome. They DO connect you with new readers. I hit the top in a lot of bigger categories, reached my highest ranking ever, and am on track to make more money this month than I did last month, though this won’t be my most profitable month this year.

What do I really care about?

While orange bestseller flags and even just GETTING a BookBub Featured deal are pretty cool, I’m about the bottom line. I want money, and I want longterm readers.

I did make a profit when you take into account the whole series, and the boost to my pen name. I moved thousands of books, which will hopefully garner me some long-term readers. I’ve also heard it’s easier to get a second BookBub after your first, so I’ll try again and see how we do.

The thing to remember about a BookBub is that it’s one blip on your overall radar. Securing Featured Deals isn’t a sustainable model for promotion, because you can’t control when they’ll say yes or no. To sustain book sales, you need to consider how you can add more blips (aka: one-time, limited promotions) or how you can set up consistent daily promotion.

For me, I’ll take more BookBubs if I can get them. But I’m also relying on the daily FB ads to keep my income up. It’s a combination of big promotions (like launches or sales) with the daily and consistent sales that work to make a steady income.

Want to learn more about affordable Facebook ads to keep your books selling? Check out my Facebook Ads Workshop!

It’s affordable, and you’ll walk away knowing how to create and test ads that make you money without breaking the bank.

 

Formatting your book — sounds boring, right? Turns out there are a lot of things to know when it comes to formatting your ebook and print book. This post will break down what you need to know!

Formatting doesn’t have to be scary, complicated, or expensive! So, let’s find out what you need to know.

LISTEN TO EPISODE 186- HOW TO FORMAT YOUR BOOKS

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app!

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Formatting might sound boring. But it’s super important and can be very simple. Let’s dive into the whys and hows.

First of all, formatting is usually the last thing you’re doing, after your book has been edited or proofread. If you’re sending ARC copies to a team of reviewers, you might need to format before this stage in order to send to them in a format they can read on an ereader. (Read more on beta and ARC readers.)

Formatting stresses us out, but it doesn’t have to. So… what really matters? Ultimately, reader experience is king. Your main goal with formatting is to keep your readers centered in the story. The end. Readers want simple. Not distracting. Not fancy.

Don’t think it has to be more than simple. Our goal should be to keep our readers in the story. Weird formatting or mistakes can pull the readers out and distract them from being lost in the fictional dream. Or, in the case of nonfiction, it might pull them out and undermine your authority.

Wherever you write your book (Word, Scrivener, Google Docs), you need to be able to export it into a mobi file for amazon and an epub file for the other retailers. There are lots of ways to get a finished product.

• If you WANT to get fancy (for some genres, like epic fantasy, this might be more fitting), I’d recommend Bookly Style for custom images for chapter headings and more.

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WHERE TO FORMAT EBOOKS AND BOOKS

Formatting can be as simple as using Word, or as complicated as adding different images for each chapter. There are a lot of options, and they don’t all have to expensive. Whatever works best for you and comes up with a clean and simple format readers can read–that’s what you should use!

It does NOT have to be expensive. It does NOT have to be complicated. Sometimes–dare I say often–simple is best.

Formatting your ebook with Word

Word is simple. It can be used to write and format simply (with chapter heads, spacing, etc) before using another program to put it into a mobi, epub, or PDF. You should make each chapter a Heading 1, while the rest of the document is Normal. Simple. Easy. And you can go straight from Word to your final document, or go from Word to one of the programs we get into next.

• Check out this simple Word formatting tutorial

Formatting your ebook with Kindle Create

I haven’t used Kindle Create, but this is a great program. It ONLY works to format for Amazon, but can be great for their platform. It’s also a good way to finish out your formatting in Word to get things like the Table of Contents (which is tricky).

• How to format your ebook and book with Kindle Create

Formatting your ebook with Draft2Digital

Draft2Digital allows you to format even if you don’t distribute with them, which means a free tool. When you upload a book with D2D, you can set up the formatting on the third stage. Basically, their tool allows you plug in a Word doc and spit out a finished mobi or epub. You can’t make changes within their porgram, so everything has to be done in the Word doc before you get there.

Formatting your ebook with Vellum

Once I made $300 a month, I made it my reward to purchase Vellum. For $250, you can get the format for ebook and print. Vellum works on mac, or you can use Mac in the cloud on PC. It makes every part of formatting incredibly easy. I would NEVER go back.

Here’s a video I created on some of the differences between Vellum and Draft2Digital:

• Check out this book on formatting with Vellum

Formatting your book with a third party

You can always hire the formatting out. If you are talking about a simple text book, this should NOT be expensive. Because, remember? Formatting is about user experience and whatever will not distract the reader and pull them out of the story.

If we’re talking cookbooks or books with tons of images, it’s a totally different animal. Poetry books, again–different.

If you hire out formatting, make sure you’re not spending hundreds for simple text formatting you could do with Word. Formatting of a simple book or ebook that is all text should NOT cost a lot of money.

HELPFUL LINKS

• KDP formatting guidelines
• KDP ebook manuscript formatting guide

WHAT YOU NEED TO CONSIDER WHEN FORMATTING YOUR BOOK

Here are some things to think about when it comes to some basic–and some odd–formatting things you might run into.

Text messages, emails, or social media

Increasingly, we need to consider modern forms of communication in contemporary books. There are many options for these. But I have a few questions you need to answer as you’re making your choice:

• How will it look in various formats and devices?
• Will it distract the reader?
• How will it translate to audio?

I’ve seen some very distracting options for texts and social media. Using too much italics and bold fonts are distracting and hard to read. No one wants to read a lot of communication in bold or italics, and if there is no name attached to the text, it can be confusing who is talking. Small caps or trying to use other fonts can be annoying and are best avoided, though I’ve seen that as well.

Personally? I would make the case for the name (in bold or not) with a colon and then the text. That makes it clear who is speaking (for audio), looks good across devices, and isn’t distracting to readers. Don’t make it artistic. Make it clear and readable.

This works best (IMHO) for a text conversation or longer texts. Every so often, sharing a single text might work best without the break. In something like the following example, I would set it up like dialogue, but use italics rather than quotes. I would not suggest this for longer communications.

EX: Jake pulled out his phone to see a single text from Shelby, which said, I’m waiting out front.

One setting you might have to adjust if possible (in Vellum, it is) is how the text after a little break like this looks. In the above image, the text acts like a scene break, which you probably don’t want, in order to avoid the way “Jake didn’t want to respond” looks.

In other programs you might not have the option, but in Vellum, you can make the text an alignment block and delete the extra space after that would cause this, or change the settings about how the text starts after a break.

Images in books

If you’re planning to format and upload your books for Amazon and other retailers, images aren’t always the best idea. They can cost more in deliverability, and also don’t look the same across devices. Unless you HAVE to have them, images may not serve your book well.

If your book is image heavy, you should consider delivering via PDF on your own website or utilizing a platform like Lulu, which might have more print options than Amazon print.

Justifying text

When you format, you can choose whether to justify the right side. If you choose to justify, that means that the right side will be even along the edge. A lot of traditional publishers use this and it’s definitely the choice for print books.

In ebooks, however, choosing to justify can create readability problems. E-readers allow for the reader to choose the size of the text. This can create issues as the reader struggles for justify the text and make it even, resulting in weird spacing. Just this week I had a reader email me about issues in my book, which were really spacing issues because I’d accidentally chosen the justify option. (Usually I don’t.)

Here’s one that I accidentally justified. An ARC reader sent me the image, thinking it was a mistake.

 

This one isn’t even a horrible example, but you can see the extra spaces in the first few lines. It’s also showing you how using drop caps to start new chapters (even a smaller drop caps) can affect reading. In this case, it’s quite distracting.

While many authors want to do what traditional publishers do, I’d prefer to stick to the reader’s ease of reading. Some may prefer justified, but when it comes to odd spacing, I would rather stick to non-justified. Totally up to you, but consider how it will look at various sizes and on different devices.

Paragraphs and indentation

For fiction books, paragraphs should have an indentation, with no white space between the paragraphs. Leaving extra spaces is a trick used by page stuffers, who aim to make books longer to get more page reads out of Kindle Unlimited.

Even if that’s not your goal, if you’re adding extra spaces in your book, that might distract readers and get you flagged from Amazon.

Nonfiction books can either format with the indents and no spaces, or have no indentation and a space between the paragraphs, like this blog post. Your choice.

You can also choose to start a chapter with drops caps or not in a lot of the programs. There are also other options like small caps or no indent for the first line of a chapter, or after a break. I do like something different at the beginning of a chapter, but in that last example, every so often, that kind of formatting creates weird results.

 

For any of these considerations, if you’re choosing a traditional publisher, you should see what their house style is and what they prefer. You might end up creating a sort of house style of your own where you know how YOU like your formatting to be.

QUESTIONS TO ASK WHEN FORMATTING

I’ll leave you with some questions to ask yourself when it comes to formatting. These might help you make different kinds of decisions that you have to make.

• Does it serve the reader?
• Is it distracting in the text?
• How much does it cost?
• What are the guidelines for the publisher you’re using?
• What is the industry standard, or the typical usage within your genre?
• Will it translate for audio when you go down that path?

and, last but most important:

• WHERE COULD I BETTER SPEND MY TIME AND MONEY? 

Formatting matters. But mostly in the sense that it shouldn’t distract and pull readers out of the story. It shouldn’t take you tons of time or cost a lot of money. It should be basic. Basic and readable is better than fancy and distracting. Your formatting should serve the reader’s experience in the story, not be clever or fancy for the sake of being clever and fancy.