The first thing, and this is by far the most overlooked part of creating an e-book, is to actually write the book. Now, you may be just copying and pasting out-of-copyright books and making ePubs of them so that you can read them on the move – or you may even be copying (*hiss*) someone else's blood, sweat and tears into a DRM-free file – but it makes sense to think about the formatting and structure of your book first. Equally important, and far too many people skip this part, is to edit and proof your book before even attempting to export it onto any sort of device.
I, personally, have spent the last 14 months writing and re-editing a book that I hope to get published. (So far I have had rejections from 1 publisher and 2 agents.) But in the meantime, I am pressing on with trying to get an ePub version (and later, perhaps even a .mobi) out onto the market while I solicit to literary agents and publishers.
Second, give a lot of thought as to the underlying formatting of your text. By this, I don't mean whether necessarily want Times New Roman or Helvetica fonts. Instead, what I mean is which bits do you want to be roman, which bold, which italic [never, BTW, to be written itallic, itallics or italics], which bold italic etc.
If you don't have these things sorted beforehand then you are only going to get yourself into an almighty mess later. Although a lot can be achieved with Find/Replace etc, it is better to think about these things at a final stage of drafting your manuscript and an early stage of your ePub than it is the other way round.
Third, the next level of formatting involves deciding on the fundamentals of paragraph styles. What this means is, where you you want text starting all the way from the left (bodyleft), where do you want text running on with first-line indents (usually body) and where do you want other styles of paragraph, such as standfirsts, crossheads, headings etc.
Each of these paragraph and character styles is going to need your consideration so that you can prepare and get your ID files (and the manuscript itself) formatted in the right way before you anywhere near exporting.
For my own book, I have decided to incorporate the following paragraph styles:
- chapter number with large number
- chapter heading in bold
- chapter subheading in italic
- standfirst in bold
This is before I even get to the body text. It might seem like a lot to keep track of, but the beauty of paragraph styles and (later) CSS means that these are easily changed, tweaked and uniformally updated at any time.
I also have the following paragraph styles:
- bodyleft
- body
These are the book designer/production editor's bread-and-butter paragraph styles. If you don't know what these mean, the first starts right from the left and the second indents (has a small gap at the start). All of the entries on this blog start directly from the left, so I would label them bodyleft if I were making paragraph styles for them in ID.
In addition, perhaps just because I like to make things complicated, I also have the following paragraph styles in my book:
- example text correct (bold)
- example text incorrect (italic)
- example text normal
- crossheads (the bold, introductory words breaking up long texts)
And finally, within my paragraph styles I need to incorporate the following character styles:
- italic
- bold
- bold italic
These are, of course, need for when I need to alter certain words within a paragraph, like this, but without making the entire paragraph that way.
These are the things that you must plan before hand, as well as actually go through and format your text using the correct paragraph and character styles applied.
The reason for this is that when you actually export your ePub these pre-formatted styles will in many cases transfer over into your ePub. However, note that not everything will look the same in your ePub as it did in Indesign – this is where CSS tinkering comes in. More on this later.
What is important about this is that by doing the work upfront, in ID, the paragraphs themselves get separated into their individual paragraph "groups". Later, when you re-style your ePub using CSS styles, you can make small changes to code that then affect all of the paragraphs throughout your document instantly.
The final thing to remember about preparing your manuscript for export to ePub is that you don't have to decide on the look of your paragraph style (whether Times etc), just the paragraph "groupings" along the lines of those listed above.
Even if you decide to use 14pt Times New Roman in your ID file, you can later make a quick change in CSS and make it 12pt (equivalent; i.e. smaller on screen) Arial, bold in red across your entire ePub book. The point is that you set it up so that when you make the change at a later date, you can do so by changing the ePub and not having to go back into ID and make a whole new export of your file – or, heaven forbid, go and code everything individually in every chapter of your ePub.
The same applies to things like leading (the space between lines of text). What you put in your ID document won't necessarily translate into your ePub – nor are you bound by those characteristics that you do choose early on. You can, and will, always change the look of them later when we tinker with the CSS.
Everything that I have written here applies to your manuscript regardless of how you decide to make it. Whether you make it in Word, you need paragraph styles; whether you make it somehow using some sort of conversion software (such as Calibre [it's "cali-ber" not "calee-bray", BTW; it's the British spelling of us caliber, with the same pronounciation]).
