The Booksmatter Blog

It’s Publishing, But Not As We Know It.

Most writers alive today are pondering the future of the eBook.  The most successful writers – those looked upon fondly by their publishers – have given the matter some thought and are leaving the inevitably tiresome details to doting publishers (and to their agents, of course, who are already busying themselves with percentages and rights).  And for these fortunate writers, publishers are already busily putting out eBook versions of their work, and these are adding to overall sales.  (Hopefully they are also adding to the authors’ overall royalties – though some are not so sure.)

But what of those writers further down the rickety ladder to success?  I’m talking about published writers – not, for the moment, those who want to be published but haven’t, so far, had success.

Most published writers are, or we feel we are, quite a long way down the ladder.  (This is not the time to rehearse the ‘If you’re not in the top twenty you’re not in Waterstones and therefore you’ll never get into the top twenty’ argument.)  Given the speed with which publishers now banish titles to the remainder pile, a good many of us have a small backlist of out-of-print titles – for which the rights have (or should have) reverted to us.  Meaning that we’re now free to reissue those titles as eBooks.

Doing that, of course, smacks awfully of self-publishing, and self-publishing smacks of vanity publishing, and vanity publishing is a place no properly published author wants to be.

Clear your mind of this.  For good.

For your own good.

Quite a few of us (a rapidly growing number) have started down the path.  Our early titles may be out of print, but back in the day they leapt hurdles to get published, quite probably they had decent reviews, maybe they even had decent sales – and, for all that they are old books, nothing changes the fact that they are good.  There are still people out there who want to read them – people who can’t find them in the libraries or bookshops, and are prepared to buy them.

In this extended blog (made up of pieces that appeared here separately) I show what happened as I set out along this path.  I’ll share my experiences as I reformat books for electronic publishing, attempt to make them into attractive eBooks, shout for attention in a crowded marketplace, and try not to get lost without a map on the digital highway.

I’m not going to try to sell you anything; I’d just like your company and to feel that, from time to time, I can hold your hand.

How to Make an Ebook (Step One)

I didn’t think this would be a problem.  After all, each of my books started out on a word processor, so somewhere in the hidden recesses must lurk their electronic seeds.  But . . .

All you need, according to the various electronic publishers (of whom more later) is a text in conventional Word format.  Most of these publishers stipulate Word (in the older 2003 version) and assure you that you can easily convert from any other format you may have used into the ubiquitous Word.  Well. . .

I started writing back in the late 1980s.  On an Amstrad.  Remember those?  Not only was Amstrad software incompatible with Microsoft or Apple, their disks were a different size.  Assuming my current PC had a floppy disk drive, which it doesn’t, that drive would not accept an Amstrad disk.  As it happens, I dealt with this problem some years ago, in order to get electronic texts for American reissues (ink on paper) of those first titles.  It wasn’t cheap; I think I spent around £200 to get a dozen disks converted.  (A novel needed 3 or 4 Amstrad disks.)  And the converted text, though readable on my PC, was crude and needed a good deal of manual reformatting.  Once I’d ditched my early Amstrad (actually, the disk drive packed up, so you could say the machine ditched me) I remained reluctant to go over entirely to Microsoft so, rather than write in Word, I used the Lotus product, Amipro.  Several novels, each of which had to be converted.

And corrected.

Which takes time.  Make no mistake, a text file of some 80 or 100 thousand words, formatted originally in something other than Word, requires your close attention.  The actual words should cause no problem, but those miscellaneous scraps of spacing, special characters and layout can go astray.  Centred text slips to the left.  Page breaks disappear.  Strange gaps manifest themselves.

The other thing I’d forgotten was that the long neglected texts lurking on my machine were not the texts printed in the published books.  Think back: all those copy-editing revisions (not all of which were minor) – did I update them onto my original?  I didn’t – or not always.  And what were those changes?  Short of comparing the word-processed text with the published, word by word or at least sentence by sentence, how would I know?  Let’s be frank: I did the best I could (or the best I could be bothered with) and ended up with a functional but not identical new text.  (Giving me a genuinely ‘different’ text for copyright purposes, perhaps?  Who knows?)

First, though, the conversion – in my case, from either Amstrad or Amipro into Word: in the next blog I’ll skip lightly through that curious journey.  Then onto the equally curious new kids on the block: some of the electronic publishers who are so willing to become our friends.

Making An Ebook (Step Two – somewhat technical)

Your chosen eBook publisher will probably ask you to submit text in conventional Word format.  They will take your text, run it through their own conversion, and bounce back to you a version fully fitted to run on an eBook reader.  No problem, you may think.  Having written in Word originally, there must surely be nothing left to do.

Dream on.  (And if you didn’t write in Word, see below.)

If you did write in Word originally, you’ll have used some of your own and some of Word’s tricks and features to give your text that special individual look, and to produce it in your style.  Those little tickles and tricks will have to go.  Even something as simple as Tab can be rejected or, worse, misinterpreted by conversion programs.  I discovered that, in my own Word files, there was what Microsoft glibly dismissed as ‘contention’ between the text as I had set it and the text as their Style Sheets saw it.  Lines that I’d set in ‘Heading 1’ style were, according to the Style Sheet, set in Bold, but occasionally I had reset odd words out of Bold.  No problem there.  But for some reason the Word-to-Electronic conversion program now ignored my changes and formatted everything back into the prescribed Bold.  Similarly with indentation: whatever variations I might have chosen, the conversion stuck to whatever was originally laid down in the Word Style Sheet.

I found a remedy, and it’s coming – but first, what if you didn’t originally write in Word?

I’d written some of my novels in the Lotus word-processing program, Amipro.  To convert looked simple, if a little tedious: I had merely to open the file in Amipro, copy the text, and paste it into an empty Word file.  Why tedious?  Partly because my earliest files had been written on a far more primitive PC, and on that puny machine I’d found it better to break a novel-length file up into several smaller parts  (I went as far as to have a separate file per chapter) which I then had to combine.  Took an hour or so.

I then found that the Amipro formatting didn’t convert correctly into Word – because whatever program you use to write the original text, it won’t convert faultlessly.  What to do?

Here comes another simple-but-tedious part, straightening out the text – and one of the key lessons of do-it-yourself electronic publishing is that whatever you do isn’t difficult but does take time.  You have to ask yourself: have I got the time?  Am I willing to take time?

Making an eBook (straightening out the text)

I sat there looking at my nice clean text, clearly laid out in Word, looking as any text does on screen: unblemished, error-free and ready to print.  I’m a professional writer, I told myself, I know how to format a book, so why shouldn’t this pretty text of mine slip straight through the publisher’s conversion program and pop out the other side equally unblemished, error-free and ready to print?

Fortunately, I’d chosen as my first electronic publisher a company called Smashwords, one of the larger, longer-established (if any of them can be called long-established in that fast-moving world) and, crucially, a company that gave me some helpful eBooks of their own.  (Yes, I know Amazon is bigger, but Smashwords gave a bigger royalty and was, I thought, a better place for me to experiment in.)  Their web site made it clear that a book poorly formatted might be rejected out of hand by their converter (amusingly called the Meatgrinder) and that, even if it did get through, those formatting errors would jar with the reader, making the resultant book look amateurish (the horror!) and might even cause it to be  turned down by retailers.

What did I have to do?  Their Style Guide laid it on the line – and once again the requirements were simple but tedious.  Editing often is.  You can get the Style Guide yourself for free, so I won’t regurgitate it, but what you do, in essence, is as follows.  (This is my version, abridged and amended from their full book.)

In Word, create a new template with a drastically reduced set of Styles.  Mine has only Normal, First Indent, First Para, Heading and Centred.  Each Style must be single spaced.  I designed First Indent for my usual paragraph style to get an indented first line, and First Para for the unindented style used for chapter and section openings.  I confined myself to a single Heading Style (bold, centred, in a slightly larger font) and made a Centred Style for minor section headings such as asterisks between scenes.

Now open your precious original text, select and copy the whole thing, and paste it into a New Document using your special eBook template described above.  Close and put away your original!  Save your eBook version under a new name, so the two files can never be confused.  All your work (the simple but tedious stuff) will take place on the eBook file.

You can do this in any sequence but my way is to first select the entire text and set it in First Indent style throughout.  Then find and rectify the chapter breaks (I use Heading Style for the chapter number or name, First Para for the next paragraph.)  Then I sort out all the variant spacings that shouldn’t be there but are (paragraphs with oversize indents, unexpected blank lines, unwanted tabs, et cetera).  And for this stage the Smashwords Style Guide was invaluable (no, I don’t get a commission: it’s free) because it shows how to use Word’s own features to find and rectify most of the problems (almost) automatically.  Amazing what I didn’t know: I’d never seen the use of the ¶ facility, for example – though I’m sure you use it all the time.

Once I had my reformatted text I had only to add the relevant lead-in and final pages (the Style Guide tells all, though requirements will vary according to your electronic publisher) and I was ready to upload.  But first . . .

Who Do You Want As Your Electronic Publisher?

In truth you are the publisher, but you need someone to format your text for the various kinds of electronic readers, and to present it to the market – rather as a conventional publisher needs a printer, a wholesaler and the retail trade.  Astonishingly, you can have all of this for free.  You can also choose – and you may choose – to pay a modest sum for a different, and hopefully better, service.

Why would anyone do this for you for free?  Because, in lieu of a fee, they’ll take a commission – but look at the very different numbers here.  Where a conventional publisher (who bears considerably higher costs) may give you, the author, a royalty varying between perhaps seven and a half to fifteen per cent of the retail price, your electronic publisher/retailer may take fifteen per cent and give you the remaining eighty-five.  (Amazon gives you seventy.)  Now, these numbers vary between publishers, and you may not want to take the cheapest.  You may – here’s another astonishing difference – choose more than one publisher for the same book.

I chose Smashwords to begin with, thinking I’d set up with them – gaining experience as I went – before republishing elsewhere, with Amazon the almost inevitable next choice.  (Watch this space.)  Smashwords would charge me nothing and pay me 85% on every book I sold.  I would set the price, and they’d pay quarterly.  It sounded almost too good to be true.

Who else could I have used?  There are some established self-publishing outlets, like Authorhouse, Book Guild and Xlibris, who take you through the process and publish you for a fee.  New names are springing up weekly, and I couldn’t begin to give recommendations, though a web search will bring you plenty.  There’s www.xinxii.com, for example, and I’ve heard well of Lulu, who offer print-on-demand as well as eBook conversion – but you pay, obviously, for print-on-demand, though they’ll send you a PDF of your book, apparently, for free, and for an extra $25 will get your book listed on Amazon USA.  (Why bother?  I found I could get mine listed there for free – more later.)

Though Smashwords and others include Kindle in the formats to which they convert, the books listed with Smashwords are not (yet) listed with Amazon.  (Kindle owners have to buy your book from Smashwords – probably via a web-link that you’ve supplied.)  All this is being negotiated with Amazon as we speak but, when a deal is finally struck, you can be sure you won’t get anything like an 85% cut from Amazon, who currently give you 70% if you deal with them direct, and since they have a bigger market they obviously can’t be left out.

Having once been through the Meatgrinder process with Smashwords, Amazon’s set-up looked to be a piece of cake.  It wasn’t.  And what I couldn’t quite see was whether I needed to set myself up as a publisher – thus acquiring exclusive ISBNs for each of my titles – or whether I should simply accept the Amazon equivalent.  (Smashwords give you a conventional ISBN, listing themselves as the publisher, where Amazon give an Amazon item number, which is not quite the same thing.)  It seemed impossible to determine from the Amazon site which way I should go.  I could set myself up as a publisher by registering with Nielsen (Britain’s official ISBN agency) at a minimum price of (currently) £118.68 (including VAT).  This would give me an initial ten ISBNs.  But did I need to?

Let’s not run before we can walk.  We’ve talked about the text.  Let’s look at the all-important book jacket.  Because:

They Always . . . Judge a Book by its Cover