Website design By BotEap.comE-books are the fastest growing segment of the book publishing industry. Every year, more and more new and established authors digitally publish their fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenplays, and scripts in e-book form.

Website design By BotEap.comOne of the most common obstacles authors face is how to make their eBook readable on as many eBook reading platforms and devices as possible. There’s Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Apple’s iPhone, and the iPod Touch, just for starters.

Website design By BotEap.comHere are five desktop publishing and eBook formatting tips to help make your book as successful as possible:

Website design By BotEap.com1. The page is dead – In traditional print publishing, the notion of “page” is critical. All of your pages have numbers, and these page numbers are probably referenced in your table of contents or index. With electronic books, the notion of the page is literally inverted. All eBook readers have a different idea of ​​what constitutes a page, because they can have different screen heights and widths, or the number of pages can change depending on whether your reader is holding your iPhone vertically or horizontally. The number of pages can also change if the reader increases the font size or changes the font style, or chooses to read your book with double line spacing instead of single line spacing. In short, try to avoid page numbers, especially for long-form narrative. If you MUST include page numbers, then limit your e-book outputs to PDFs, because PDFs do a good job of maintaining formatting (although PDFs are a horrible e-reading format).

Website design By BotEap.com2. Keep the format simple – Readers buy your books for the words and stories, not for the format. Complicated formatting can prevent the reader from consuming the words of your book. You want to make sure your book is optimized to read as plain text, which is how most e-readers display your book.

Website design By BotEap.com3. Avoid Common Bad Formatting Habits – Print publishing is very forgiving, because as long as your manuscript looks the way you want it to look on screen, it usually prints fine. E-books are less forgiving. Some of the most common e-book formatting errors include: Using tabs or spaces instead of Word’s indent feature; use multiple paragraph returns to designate page breaks (creates blank pages in your ebook); and the use of multiple body text styles instead of just “normal” text (creates inconsistent-looking text).

Website design By BotEap.com4. Publish your book in as many ebook formats as possible – It is impossible to predict which e-reading device or platform your reader will use to read your book. You can read it online through a web browser, you can download it to your home computer to print, you can read it on your Kindle, or you might want to read it on your iPhone or Blackberry. They may also want to read the same book on multiple devices simultaneously. Therefore, you need to publish in multiple eBook formats so that the reader can read your book their way. Popular formats include HTML (readable in web browsers), .txt (plain text, readable by almost everything), PDF (good for books where strict formatting is essential to enjoy reading [picture books, books with charts, graphs, tables of contents and indexes]), epub (an open industry eBook format used by more and more e-reading devices and applications), and .mobi (used by Kindle).

Website design By BotEap.com5. Avoid DRM – DRM, or “digital rights management”, refers to schemes that seek to prevent the illegal copying or piracy of a digital work, such as an e-book or music. Customers hate DRM, because DRM treats them like a criminal and prevents them from enjoying their book the way they want to enjoy it. Don’t use DRM with your ebook. Market research shows that DRM cannot prevent piracy and only infuriates its customers. In fact, research shows that DRM-free books outsell books with DRM.