eBook Formatting

The motivation for writing your book should be to give the world a great story and a memorable experience — no matter how you publish or who you're competing with.

Can you guess the common eBook formatting mistake authors make when preparing for ePUB conversion? You should NOT use the tab key to indent paragraphs.

We've added two new videos to our self-publish production series: How To Set Up Your Book Pagination and eBook Conversion Basics. Watch and learn!

For years, as a book designer and a blogger at The Book Designer blog, I’ve looked at hundreds of self-published books, and let me tell you, it’s not a pretty picture. Sure, there are lots of authors who have taken the time to learn the details of how books are put together, and made a good job of their books... it’s the other ones, the books put together by well-meaning authors who really want to succeed but, for one reason or another, are unclear on how exactly to go about it. Those are the ones that have big problems.

Even though they’ve been around for almost 10 years, a lot of folks are still trying to understand the world of eBooks. Our BookBaby publishing specialists field dozens of questions about eBooks every day, and any question, no matter how basic, deserves a good answer.

Think you're ready to self-publish your eBook? Great! We're here to help, and this eBook checklist will help you get off on the right foot in your journey from your laptop to the marketplace. Note: many of these items are needed for printed book production as well.

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a hundred times: There is no fixed pagination with an eBook, however, you CAN designate where you want page breaks.