Publishing the Goldfish

Formatting - ‘Many of These eBooks are not Formatted Properly’

Welcome to Publishing the Goldfish, a title so vague this blog could be about anything. But it’s not.

    
This is my journey from publishing obscurity to, well, hopefully making enough money so that I can call myself a writer to my friends and family without feeling like a phony.

I spent fourteen months writing my second novel, The Goldfish and the Earthquake ­­­- which should go some way to explaining the blog’s title … doesn't actually, never mind. It’s based on a short story I wrote of the same name, the only story my close-to-the-knuckle dad didn't accidentally criticise with faint praise. Inspiring stuff, I know, but it motivated me – you’d understand if you’d met my dad. I sat down when most are in bed, wrote a first draft over three months, let it stew while I wrote another novel, then started the laborious task of editing, and reediting, ad infinitum. I finally, this summer, finished my novel, polished it up to a high-mirror sheen. Deleted adverbs. Cut huge chunks of fat off. Read every sentence like it were the instructions for one of Jigsaw’s torture devices.

I always knew I would self-publish it. Like many would-be writers, I’m naive and ambitious. I think I have important stories to tell people. Literature that entertains. But another side of me is pragmatic, a little voice inside me that tells me I’m not good enough, that if I send this novel to multiple literary agents and publishers, they’ll just confirm my worst fears: that it’s no good and, worse, that I can’t even write one decent sentence, let alone a string of 80,000 or so that make up an entertaining story with interesting characters and socially important themes. So self-publishing it is for me. Besides, getting recognition from some editor or literary agent has never been my goal. My goal has always involved you, the person reading this now. There’s no need to write more: you’re clever.

So, finished novel. How the hell do I make this into an eBook? Google was used extensively, bringing up software that could just, at the click of fingers, magically turn my manuscript into a professional-looking eBook. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? It is. There is a multitude of eBook-conversion freeware, all of it useless. I put my manuscript through a few of these and came out with a document that had no indents, no spaces between paragraphs, just a block of text that looked about as inviting as reading material as the list of ingredients on the side of industrial-strength glue.

My next attempt was using a blog that offered instructions on the whole process, using two free-to-download eBook programs: Sigil and Calibre. I spent hours on this, came out with an eBook that was ninety percent there. It looked great in comparison to the conversion softwares’ results. I nearly, very nearly, just accepted the result, knowing it wasn't perfect. The problem I had with it was that the first sentence of each paragraph after a scene break or at the start of a chapter was indented, which isn't the industry standard. Here's what I mean:

     Industry standard:

   

     Result using blog:

    

I know, you think I’m being pedantic, but hear me out. I’ve come across eBooks with formatting issues such as the one above while reading samples on Amazon, and haven’t bought them. I was distracted away from the content, thinking about what other corners may have been cut. Ultimately, and here’s the big part, distracted from getting sucked into the story.

Formatting errors look untidy and, if we’re to be considered writers by anyone else apart from our doting mothers and enthusiastic friends, these are issues that will act as a barrier to that. Ever seen a painting displayed in an art gallery that’s presented in a tatty frame, noticeable gaps at corner joins? Ever seen a car displayed in a showroom that has yesterday’s seagull target practice displayed on the bonnet? You read every sentence of your novel like a crazed prison inmate deciphering a code in one of the library’s books that would hopefully lead to his breaking out, so why would you not bring that level of professionalism to how your book is formatted? You wouldn’t, right?

So here’s the solution, and, before I tell you, I just want to write that I’m not affiliated with this author – I don’t even follow her on Twitter: Self Publishing in Ebook and Print: A practical guide for the technically challenged by Patsy Trench, which is available from Amazon.

This is a nuts-and-bolts guide to formatting your eBook – and there’s even a print guide – and you’ll only need word. You read right. It’s funny, informative and, here’s the reason I like it, easy to follow. (You’d understand fully if you’d ever spoken to me on a Monday morning). And the result is great: no formatting issues of which to speak. How do you like that, dad? This looks like it’s been produced by a writer, a real one.

For those of you are content with ninety percent, here’s the instructional blog:

http://cameronchapman.com/ebook-formatting-the-easy-way.htm

This is no way a dig at Cameron: the fact that he published this free of charge to help self-publishers is a great thing – he even offers a fix for the formatting issue on which I focussed, though I couldn’t get it to work (as couldn’t some of the people who had replied on the message board).

Chance of success in self-publishing – in fact, publishing in general – is very slim. Maximise your chances at success by formatting your eBook properly. And remember, no one likes bird poo.

Thanks for reading. The next blog post will be about cover design - DIY and otherwise.

The Goldfish and the Earthquake is available now on Kindle at Amazon: