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Writing an Ebook: Formatting

When I first started the process of writing an Ebook, the thing that I was most nervous about was formatting it for upload to Amazon. They are very specific about their settings and what you need to do so that it will look professional. I was listening to a Podcast and they mentioned this company, 52 Novels, who you can send your file to and they do all the formatting. It seemed like a good option until I got the quote back. $350! That’s a lot of Ebooks I’d need to sell at $2.99 to make this investment back so I knew I’d need to figure it out myself.

The first step was to download Open Office. It’s free! I use a Mac so Microsoft Word isn’t really an option, although this is what Amazon recommends as their first choice. Then, I looked carefully at all the advice that Amazon gives for formatting and although it seemed overwhelming, it was actually not so difficult to figure out, except for making the Table of Contents and Hyperlinks to other parts of the text. I uploaded one of my initial drafts to Amazon, and then used the online previewer to see what it would look like on the various devices. Success! And certainly not worth the $350 to pay someone to do it for me and actually, it really is something that anyone with basic computer literacy can figure out for themselves.

Next step: formatting for other sites besides Amazon, but I have a degree of confidence now so I don’t anticipate too much hassle.

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