Creating your own e-book may be necessary for a number of different reasons. It may be that you are writing one to give as a freebie to your site visitors, or an opt-in incentive, or you want to sell it via Amazon or Kindle. You can do a lot of things with an eBook, and yes, you can certainly make money from it.
Working professionally as a writer, you can choose to have your publications turn into digital e-book with just a few clicks of the mouse. Whether you are working with a publisher or a distributor, you can definitely convert your manuscripts into an electronic book or e-book.
A widely known and most commonly-used file format for an e-book is PDF from Adobe Acrobat. In this word-processing program, you will be the one to do the actual design of your book or desired publication. Programs such as Pagemaker can be used for other publications with illustrations, which is not featured in the Adobe Acrobat program. Microsoft Word is the most commonly used program for word processing and we will use formatting in MS Word in this article.
In order to convert your e-book into a PDF file, you do not need to own a copy of Adobe Acrobat. You will only have to buy the program if you need to access additional features such as hotlinked URLs, and import pages from other programs.
The Adobe Acrobat software costs around $300 and is totally worth the price, especially if you don’t plan to stop with just one eBook. If you think you will be working with the Acrobat software for more than once, you will need to consider buying the program.
As of writing, newer versions of Adobe Acrobat have been released that have more features. Often, this software is bundled with hardwares such as scanners. You may also find it available on a lease, paying in a monthly basis. Prices of the Adobe Acrobat varies depending on where you purchase, with prices ranges from $137-$400, respectively.
Designing Your E-book
Primarily, formatting your e-book can be done using a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word. When a document has a good format and it is well organized, the readers will find it easier to read and will entice them to keep reading your book.
Obviously, no one wants to read anything that will give them vertigo. You would need to tap on your creativity a bit, as well as research and take down notes in preparing your eBook to give it the right format.
If you don’t have a lot of time to do this, you can use customizable templates found online, or use MyeCoverMaker to create your own eBook cover design online using cutting-edge tools that can give your work a professional look with just a few commands.
Now there are elements in the design of your e-book that you need to consider, whether you plan to design your own cover or have it done by a pro.
Page size. A regular, legal size page is a common printing size for documents. But most books are not printed in a size of 8.5×11 inches. Typically, e-books are formatted between 5×7 and 6×9. Take note that your first step should be to set a custom page in the MS Word’s set up.
Margins. Setting margins should follow your customization of an e-book project. A margin of three-quarters of an inch on all sides. You may also turn off the option for mirror margins, since e-books to hot have left and right pages. Setting the margins, in the beginning, will spare you a lot of headaches.
Headers and Footers. Including the title of the project or book that you are working on and the page numbers are the easiest steps in headers and footers. You can place the numbers on the bottom left, bottom right or at the bottom center of the pages. It is recommended to use a smaller font size for the header and using italic or bold. One option is to put the page number in the footer and title in the header.
Using the “Insert: Break: Section: Next Page” command will ensure that your header does not appear on the first page of every chapter. Make sure have checked “different first page” in the Layout menu. You also have the option to create a new header for every chapter of your book. To enable this, turn off the “same as previous” option in the header command.
Font. For the fonts, it comes highly recommended to make use of standard fonts. Times, Times New Roman and Palatino are some of the commonly-used fonts. Arial and Helvetica are good non-serif fonts for chapter headings and subheadings.
A minimum of 11 points for your texts can be a good choice, and subheads can be done with 12-14 points of fonts. Remember the reading onscreen displays the size of the book slightly bigger and increases the size of your fonts. Be sure to test the look of some fonts before finalizing your book, check in print and onscreen.
Illustrations. You may have already known, but including photos, drawings, and illustrations to your e-book does not cost you extra money. However, they do add to the book’s file size. Also, many e-publishers will not accept illustrations.
Saving illustrations to a lower resolution will help you reduce file sizes of your illustration. 3rd party program such as Photoshop can allow you to reduce, crop and make other changes to your illustrations or images.
With MS Word, you are allowed to place images and illustrations with your text, but you may find it difficult to position them precisely where you prefer. If your e-book project involves a lot of images and illustrations, you should consider using MS Publisher or other desktop publishing software. Remember to leave enough margin between the image and the text surrounding it. Also, do include captions in your photos where it is appropriate.
Front Matter. A title page, a copyright page, table of contents and acknowledgments are the pages that start your book, not the first chapter. But the counting of the pages do begin in the title page, it should be considered as “Page 1.”
Back matter. At the back, the index, your biography and contact information must be included. It is also a place to put advertisements for other books written by you.
Formatting in Acrobat
Your MS Word Document will be converted by Adobe Acrobat “as is” to a PDF file. To proceed to conversion, use the “print” command in Word, and select the “Save as File” option on the drop-down list. Make sure to select “Acrobat PDF” as the type of PDF. You can also choose where to save your PDF file. Pressing the print button will convert your word file to a PDF.