Someday my poor book may see the light of day... I just re-read the last 3 paragraphs above... Is there any way to search for italicized text, or to search for a certain font. The whole book is one style, and I have italicized, bolded or changed the fontface to get the 4 different (apparent) text styles used throughout. So I need to change the paragraph style, as I understand it. I could just submit it as is, but that would probably mess up the e-book formatting. I think I know how to do styles now. I see one rule I broke "Never mix character styles and manual formatting" but onward...
My high school Latin teacher used to tell us, "The first hundred years are the hardest." Many (dare I say "most"?) people who use a word processor don't ever think about using paragraph styles to format their work. There's a fairly gentle learning curve to mastering styles, but it makes life much easier once you get the hang of it. E-book conversion typically relies heavily on styles, which is another reason why you should use them rather than the brute force method of leaving everything in the default style and then manually overriding it when you want something changed.
I like the way you expressed that, it's exactly what happens (happened) and what I suspected was gonna happen (incoming!) with the e-book version. My book has a part 2, that is it is a two-part series and Book 2 is gonna go much more smoothly... Putting in the correct styles, throughout the book, should only take a few hours, not a daunting task. I think I will make two versions. One version without photos (paperback version) and the other (e-book) with 50-100 photos. That way I can cut down on the number of pages io the paperback version, which keeps bothering me - it's too long, over 400 pages now, with the photos. W/O the photos, and increasing page size to 6" x 9" I can get it under 300 pages. I was looking at the trim around the pages as another way to cut down on the number of pages. The first book I picked up to see how the "Pros" do it is Dean Koontz's "Dark Rivers of the Heart" where there are odd page number on the top, and the book title on the right, with nothing on the bottom. That would produce a little extra page-space on the bottom, cutting down the page count. I don't need to endlessly repeat the book title on every page of the book. LOL! The potential audience is two population groups - one, over 40, the other 10-20. It sounds odd, but it is what it is. The paperback would appeal to the older crowd and the e-book to the youngsters, I guess. I was surprised to learn that a "long" e-book costs (to produce) significantly more than a "short" e-book. Likewise I may conclude that inserting 50-100 vibrant color photos, rather than B/W photos, in the eb00k, is correspondingly also going to significantly increase production costs for the e-book?
I don't think it should require even a few hours. Start at the beginning of the actual book (not the front matter). First, define your styles -- I believe you said there are basically four. Since typically the first paragraph of a new chapter or subsection following a break doesn't get the first line indented, you may want to add a fifth just for those. Call that style "First" or something similar that works for you. Next, just highlight the entire text and set the style to your default style ("Default," "Body Text," or whatever it's called). That gives you a baseline. Then scroll through the manuscript and assign an appropriate style to any paragraph that ISN'T the default style. You need two versions anyway. The file for uploading as an e-book should not have any headers or footers, it shouldn't have any half title pages, and if your print manuscript uses anything other than Times New Roman, for the e-book manuscript change it to Times New Roman. Don't go crazy with that. "Page count" applies only to print anyway, and the margins should be generous enough that on the inside the text doesn't appear to be disappearing into the binding, and on the outside the margin should be generous enough for the reader's thumb to hold the book without obscuring too much of the text. Making the margins too skinny IMHO just makes a book look cheap. You can also affect page count by font selection. If you're already using Times New Roman, of course, this won't apply because Times New Roman was created to squeeze the maximum amount of readable text into the narrow columns of newspaper pages. If you are not going to use Times New Roman for print (and most book designers agree that you should never use Times New Roman for a book), then the choice of font can make a big difference over the course of several hundred pages. I concur. And that leads to a conundrum for you, because older readers may not have as good eyesight as younger readers, so you have to be more careful about using too small of a font and squeezing too much text onto one page or into one line. For optimum readability, the average length of your lines of text should generally fall between 55 and 75 characters (different sources use slightly different numbers, but in this range), and the optimum is approximately 65. You can check this using LibreOffice Writer by highlighting five or ten lines of text in your formatted manuscript, then click Tools > Word Count. The pop-up will tell you how many words are in the selected area, and also how many characters (both including and excluding spaces). Just divide by 5 or 10. Do this at two or three random locations through the manuscript. I also like to print two facing pages on standard 8-1/2 x 11 (or A4 if you're in Europe) paper. Then I manually draw the margins, cut the pages to the trim size, staple them together at the binding edge, and then hold it as a book to see how it looks. My understanding may be off-base, but I don't think the number of images affects the production cost. What it does affect is the file size, and the file size affects the delivery cost, due to bandwidth.
That's completely wrong - you absolutely shouldn't use styles, or any other kind of embedded formatting... leave everything in default style if you don't want your ebook to be a mess. The simpler your file is the better it will convert... the only exception is that chapter titles need to be clearly identifiable...the usual recommendation is that they be two point size large than other text and emboldened. another point to bear in mind is that fonts aren't usually locked in ebooks...most of the time the reader will decide what font they want to read out of a list of five common ones...so its a bad idea to rely on different fonts to separate points of view or sections or whatever. Italics may also not render well on all readers so its wise not to use them for big blocks of text
Its only a production cost issue if you are paying a formatting service to do your formatting... if you're using software to do it yourself neither length or images make any difference to the negligible production cost what does matter is file size as this drives up the delivery cost which amazon will deduct from your royalty...if the file is too large you may not make any money... the proviso to that is that delivery costs are generally only charged when you have 70% royalty selected...if a lot of photos are essential (as with some sorts of non fiction) you can select 35% royalty to ensure you actually make some money...of course if the file is truly massive amazon may reject it delivery policies on other markets vary so its worth doing your homework before making a decision
Yes ... and no. Chapter numbers or titles should be identified as style Heading 1 so the conversion software knows where to put chapter breaks. But you are correct that beyond that a lot of styles can result in a muddled conversion. I should have been clearer in my meaning. That's why I suggested using Times New Roman. The e-book reader will ignore it. If other fonts are used, depending on the conversion they may or may not be embedded, and that may cause unexpected results.
I have the four different fonts to differentiate for the reader: 1) the main narrative 2) Comments from coaches or other players (usually a couple of paragraphs for each comment) 3) newspaper stories 4) a spiritual or ghost character who inserts itself into the narrative whenever it pleases. Yea, when I am reading a long novel, and the author puts in a page or two of italics, it disrupts my "reading flow" but then after a few minutes of reading italicized text, i get used to it, and get disrupted again when he switches back to regular font...
I miswrote, I was meaning "delivery cost" not "production cost" when I asked why the delivery cost for larger files or color photos would be significantly higher. Why would it be higher? Amazon is going to charge the author much more for an item that takes 30 seconds to download rather than 20?
If you Google you can see amazons list of delivery charge against file size. I’m on a phone so I can’t link it. as to why? Because they can. Because they have 85% of the market and can do pretty much whatever they want
that will be difficult to preserve on an e-reader you may want to find a different way of identifying them
Most e-readers can handle italics and bold-face -- I think. (I have a Kindle, and I have four different e-readers on my Windows 10 computer.) But they don't all handle the same file the same way. One may recognize italics but not center justification. Another may handle justification but won't handle italics. Some can handle indentations, while others may choke on them. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that you download a few e-readers, convert one chapter to .EPUB, and test it. If you have a Windows computer, you can try the Calibre reader (not the Calibre editor), Cool Reader, Ice Cream Reader, Sumatra, B&N's Nook reader, and any others you can find. Changing font color could work on desktop-based e-readers, but the dedicated readers like the Kindles, Kobo eReaders and such are B&W (or 16 shade gray scale), so color is not a good option.
That's a great idea. I already have a Fire and an old Kindle. maybe there are some simulators on the Net, too.
