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Showing posts from January, 2016

Format your ebook for Paperback Printing

The e-book for Waging War was uploaded yesterday (!!!) and my pre-order will officially publish on January 26th. I learned a very cool trick from another author about .mobi files. When I uploaded my word doc to KDP, it gave me the option to use the online viewer for quality control (which I always do), or download a .mobi file (for the first time, I did that too). I now have a .mobi file to send out to reviewers as ARCs, without having to use Calibre, or take the extra step of converting it myself. We've already established my relative laziness, the .mobi-to-ARC trick is just further evidence of it. So, after celebratory wine (and fascinating conversations about the differences between men and women) with my editor last night, today was all about formatting the ebook doc to be uploaded to Createspace and Ingramspark for paperback printing. As with my last blog post about formatting an ebook, these are very personal preferences, and should be taken more as guidelines than rule

How to set up a Word doc to Publish a Book

I'm days away from uploading book four of my series, so I've finally figured things out well enough to be able to explain what it is I do. Most of it is self-taught, and all of it is specific to the way I publish my books. But please feel free to take from my experience whatever works for you. 1. Properly format your BLANK manuscript (I write in Word because there's no learning curve, and because I'm too lazy to teach myself something new like Scrivener.) Spacing: I set the first line indent at .3, the space between lines at 1.15, and I remove the space before and after paragraphs. Format: I change the font for the "normal" style to Garamond, 11.5pt (my books are long and I need all the help I can get to cut down on paperback page count), and I set the "Heading 1" style to OptimusPrinceps, 14pt. The fonts are specific to The Immortal Descendants series, but do your research, there are only a few fonts that are considered acceptable for the main