Hello again, finally! I first drafted this post 3 months ago, but I was nervous about posting it because I felt like I was constantly saying, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” In my experience, formatting an e-book is the most difficult part of publishing (aside from getting people to buy the book, of course). As with all the posts in this series, this comes with the disclaimer that I am not an expert, but you can consider this a starting point.
This is the third post in my Publishing a Poetry Book series. In case you missed the previous posts, you can check out what I had to say about The Manuscript and Formatting the Paperback. I have self-published novels before, and I often send e-book versions of my novel drafts to my e-readers to read through them without having to print them out. Before publishing my poetry book, I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about creating an e-book on various self-publishing platforms.
The one I used most often for my novels was Draft2Digital. This is a great site for creating e-books, because Draft2Digital allows you to do whatever you want with the e-books you create on their site, even if you don’t publish with them. I would upload my manuscript, use D2D to convert it to an EPUB file, save this to my computer, and upload that file to publish directly on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Kindle Create is a program made by Amazon for creating e-books, which allows you to edit your book directly in the program, while with D2D, you have to edit your manuscript and then re-upload it if you want to make changes. I prefer D2D simply because Kindle Create saves a few separate files on your computer, and with D2D, the file you download and save is the e-book file and nothing else.
The problem: Even with D2D’s most basic settings, it applies certain formatting to the content of the book that changes the way a poem appears on the page. With prose, it’s common to have the first few words of a new chapter in a larger font or in small caps. The program would also add extra line breaks between the lines of a poem, thinking each line break in the poem indicated a new paragraph. It was difficult to distinguish between stanzas.
I did a bit of research and discovered Calibre. Take a few minutes to download this free program to your computer.
Since I’m still new to Calibre and go through some trial and error when I use it, I don’t want to try to tell you how it works, so I will link here to Calibre’s own help page that has a few guides about how to convert documents into e-books.
What I will guide you through in this post is how you can best prepare your manuscript before uploading to Calibre to make the e-book easy to navigate.
If you’ve been following along with my posts, you should have saved a copy of your manuscript before you began doing any formatting for paperback. I would make an extra copy of this unformatted version, just to have a back up.
I inserted a page break between every poem. Swiping to the next page for the next poem is like pausing for a breath between thoughts. I like the idea of each poem standing on its own. Besides, you probably put each poem on a separate page in the paperback version, right? Why not do this for the e-book version as well?
(Of course, this is simply my preference. If you would rather have your poems flow seamlessly from one to the next, that’s perfectly fine. Depending on your writing style, this might be a better choice for your book.)
If you did include a table of contents in your original manuscript, you do not need this for an e-book, so you can delete that page. You could leave it in and put a hyperlink to each poem, but in my experience, this is a lot more trouble than it’s worth. If you apply a Heading style to the title of each poem in Word (or whatever word processing program you use), Calibre can generate a table of contents for the e-book that readers can use to navigate through the book on their devices.
You can preview the e-book directly in Calibre, and if you spot a typo, you can correct it in the program without having to fix it first in your original document and then uploading the file again. The e-books I have made in Calibre remain faithful to the formatting I had in my Word document, even when I had indented lines, bold or italic words, or a larger sized font for titles. I used Times New Roman as the font, but the beauty of e-readers is that the font can be changed according to the options available on the device, so the font does not really matter.
Key Considerations
- Consistency in your document is essential. This will make the conversion process go much more smoothly.
- Before uploading your document to be converted, make sure you have page breaks and line breaks where you want them.
- Keep a backup copy of your document in case you want to start over on the formatting. I’m of the belief that you can never have too many backup copies of your work, as long as you can keep them straight and know which is the most recent.
- Take advantage of the preview features, in Calibre/Kindle Create/whatever program you use to convert your document, and in whatever service you use to distribute your e-book for sale (KDP, Nook, Kobo, etc.) If you can, download the EPUB to read on your own e-reader or your phone before hitting submit.
I hope this post at least gives you a few things to think about when converting a poetry manuscript to an e-book format. The more you play around with the formatting, the easier it will become, though each project has its challenges. I promise not to take so much time before the next post in the series. They will all be linked on This Page on my website for easy reference.
Michelle Wicklow 