August 2, 2011

Free Ebook Formatting Guides for MOBI, EPUB, and Smashwords

Getting Formatting Right - Time to Channel Your Inner Nerd
As a reader, I am getting pretty upset at the low quality of ebooks out there. Not so much the writing, but rather the shoddy formatting. Changing fonts, page breaks in the middle of chapters, blank pages, strange colors that look like they came from my grandma's couch circa 1973, etc. All that hard work spent on writing a book goes out the window if the formatting is done half-assed. This is unacceptable, and the standards need to improve drastically.

Instead of whining about it and leaving nasty reviews on Amazon, I have made two guides and six video tutorials on how to format ebooks with XHTML and getting work published on Smashwords. If you can write a book, you can take the time to format a book.

I'm not trying to sell you some cheesy software, and I hope that this free service will be useful to people looking to hold up high standards and sell quality material to the readers.
  1. A Step-by-step Formatting Guide for MOBI (Amazon's Kindle) and EPUB (the others) with XHTML
  2. A Step-by-step Formatting Guide for Smashwords
Indeed, formatting is not the sexiest thing in the world, but it needs to get done properly. I'll keep these guides as pages on the top menu bar, since I hope to improve on them as time goes on after hearing everyone's feedback and suggestions. Hopefully, they are useful.
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