A & P Class
4
Designing Your eBook
A badly formatted e-book will alienate readers more quickly than a badly designed print book. At best, it will look amateurish; at worst, it will be difficult to read or "navigate." Fortunately, you can create a professional "look" with just a few simple Word commands. You'll need to consider the following elements:
Font. It's best to use standard fonts such as Times, Times New Roman, Century/New Century Schoolbook, or Palatino. Non-serif fonts such as Arial or Helvetica are good for chapter headings and subheads. Use a minimum of 11 points for your text, and 12 to 14 points for subheads. (Keep in mind that the reader can increase the display size of your book when reading it onscreen.) Since some fonts look better onscreen than in print, and vice versa, test your fonts both ways!
Illustrations. One nice feature of an e-book is that it doesn't cost extra to include photos, drawings, charts, etc. Illustrations do add to the total file size of your e-book, however -- and this is an important consideration for the reader. )
If you have a scanner, you can scan your own illustrations and convert them to .gif or .jpg files. A program like Photoshop will enable you to crop, enlarge, or reduce those images, or make other modifications. It will also enable you to save them at a lower resolution, thus reducing file size.
While Word does allow you to incorporate illustrations in your text, it's not always easy to position them precisely where you want them. If you plan to use a lot of illustrations, you might want to consider using a desktop publishing program. When laying out photos or illustrations, be sure to leave an ample margin between the image and the surrounding text, and, where appropriate, include captions.
Front Matter. Your book doesn't really start with "Chapter One, page one." It starts with "front matter," including:
A title page
A copyright page. The easiest way to generate one of these is to check the copyright page of any print book and type in the same information, substituting your own name, book title, date, etc. Don't include the "Library of Congress" information or the numbers that indicate the "edition" of the book. Don't bother with an ISBN unless you actually plan to offer physical copies of the book (e.g., on disk) through electronic bookstores like Amazon.com.
Acknowledgements, if desired
Table of contents (you can generate this automatically in Word by using "headings" formats for your chapter titles and subheads).
While many print books number front matter separately from the rest of the book, this can be awkward in an e-book. The easiest approach is to treat the first page of your book (even if it's the title page) as "Page 1."
Margins. Use Word's "Format: Document" command to set margins to a minimum of three quarters of an inch on all sides. (You may wish to set top and/or bottom margins slightly larger if you plan to use a header and/or footer.) Since e-books don't have "left" and "right" pages, turn off the "mirror margins" option.
Headers and Footers. Place a "running header" at the top of each page. The easiest approach is to simply include the title of your book and the page number. You can place this information flush left, flush right, or centeredÑor place the title flush left and the page number flush right. I recommend using a slightly smaller font size for the header, and (if you like) using italic or bold. I also like to use the "border" command to draw a line between the header and the text. Another option is to put the title in your header and the page number in your footer.
To make sure that your header doesn't appear on the first page of each chapter, you'll need to use the "Insert: Break: Section: Next Page" command (rather than a page break) to separate chapters. Then, make sure that you've checked "different first page" in the "Format: Document: Layout" menu. You can also create a new header for each chapter (e.g., using the chapter title rather than the book title); to do this, turn off the "same as previous" option in the header command.