Part 3 of my “tutorial” about publishing.  Theoretically at this point, you should have a “copyrighted” and “edited” work ready for formatting.  Now, I know what you are thinking.  You want to know about making a pretty cover.  Nope.  Right now we need to format the guts of the book so we can make eBooks and paper books.

For paper books I use this Word plug-in http://bookdesignwizard.com/.  It works super well with Createspace.  I tried multiple times to format a book in Word alone and it sucks.  I do not have InDesign or any of those fancy book lay out program thingies.  All my paper books have been laid out with this easy to use plug-in Book Design Wizard.

For eBooks I use this blog post https://jwmanus.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/format-a-nice-looking-novel-for-smashwords/  and format in Word.  You COULD download that Smashwords style guide OR you could just follow this post.  Set up your Word Styles as directed.  Then nuclear you manuscript into notepad and paste it into a new Word document.  This formatting words for both Kindle and Smashwords.  Also, works good for Draft2Digital.  For the Kindle version I just upload it as is.  For Smashwords, you have to put in the “Smashwords Edition” and it has to be a .DOC and not the newer version.

You can also pay someone to format for you, if you want.  The person that runs the blog I mentioned does paid formatting I believe.  Formatting isn’t hard per say….just frustrating at times!

2019 Update! I write my books in Word and then use Draft2Digital to get my ePub and PDF paper file.  Draft2Digital has some nice formatting that only takes the click of a button.   I then use the PDF for my paperback books and the ePub for my Google Play Books.

For Amazon, I have been using Kindle Create to do the formatting.  It’s still a bit “beta” but when you don’t have a Mac so you can’t get Vellum what’s a girl to do?