How to Self-Publish: Basic Styling Rules

The popular Amazon Kindle

Can you guarantee what your ebook will look like on your audience's ereaders? Ebook reading devices come in so many shapes and sizes it can be bewildering but a few simple rules will help you prepare your own text for every eventuality.

After you’ve written your text (spell-checked it, re-read it three times and asked a proof reader to check through it, of course) there are some basic issues to sort out when preparing your text for ebook publication. That’s because the formatting requirements for the Nook, Apple iBookstore, Amazon Kindle, Kobo and the rest, are all be slightly different.

It’s important to bear in mind that an ebook is really a computer file and therefore very different from a physical book. In traditional publishing, apart from the editing and proof-reading, the fonts and line spaces are chosen, the pagination is fixed, the cover designed, and somewhere along the line, an ISBN is assigned so that booksellers worldwide can identify the book. This can take 12 months.

Although the route to epublication is much shorter (two months at most), some of these processes apply to the ebook route too, but the differences lie in the need for text to adapt to a hardware device, that is, any device that can read ebooks: computers, tablets, ereaders, smartphones. For instance, there are variations in the default font choices between similar devices and between operating systems on similar phones. It's worth noting that the ereading software on a device is designed to give consumers the power to consume in a manner that suits them: font sizes can be changed, typefaces can be changed, orientation of the screen can be changed.

So, to give your book the best chance to be readable on all of these devices you need to follow some basic rules:

1. Use the most basic software writing tool you are comfortable with: beware of Ms Word which creates hidden styles.
2. I prefer to type in plain text, underline italics and headers, then, when I'm happy with the writing itself, transfer the text into Ms Word or Apple’s Pages for the final styling.
3. Every space and word must be given a style so choose a basic text style and apply it to the whole text. 
4. Methodically work through your text and exception style headings and italics.
5. Try to keep the number of styles down - a basic indented text style, a paragraph starting non-indent style, plus headers (A, B and C), a bold character style and italic character style will cover most fiction needs. Adding a list or bullet point style is useful for non-fiction.
6. Use a standard typeface, i.e. the one’s you see on every computer, so Times, Times New Roman, Helvetica or Courier New. 
7. Use 12pt for the main body of your text, 16-18pt for the headings. Most ereaders look at the proportional differences in font sizes to work out what do with your text, not the absolute size.
8. Don’t use soft returns 
9. Don’t use page breaks within chapters.
10. Don’t use tables, sidebars.

These are really simple to follow. Once you've mastered them you'll find it's all quite liberating. I spend a great deal of my own time planning and styling books for print publication and it's a great joy to hit a simple manuscript which requires basic ebook styling.

Coming soon: More Editors for eBooks; Software Choices