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CRATER LIBRARY & PUBLISHER STYLE GUIDE FOR FORMATTING E-BOOK
At Crater Library & Publisher, we believe in “SIMPLICITY”. The saying ”too many cooks spoil the broth”, can also apply to publishing. Complex and stylish layouts and formats can render your e-book unreadable. It is important for you to read this guideline before uploading and publishing your book on Crater Library & Publisher. Our aim is to enable you upload and publish without stress and hassle.
UNDERSTANDING THE E-BOOK AND ITS FORMATS
WHAT IS AN E-BOOK? It is an electronic version of a printed book also referred to as a digital book or e-edition. It consists of text, images or both that can be read on a computer or hand-held device designed specifically for this purpose.
Writers, publishers and readers have many formats to choose from when publishing or downloading a digital book. Listed below are the most common e-book formats used by Nigerians;
DOC -this is a Microsoft word format and it is published as .doc. Its advantages include conversion of e-book into other e-book formats and can be edited too.
DOCX -this is also a Microsoft word format and published as .docx. It is not widely supported by e-book readers but it is easily converted and edited.
EPUB – created by the International Digital Publishing Forum and published as .epub. It is very popular as it can be read on many devices e.g. Black berry, Kobo e-reader, Mackintosh, Android, IOS devices, Kindle books, Adobe digital editions etc.
MULTIMEDIA EBOOK – published as .exe or .html. This format includes a combination of text, audio, images and videos. It is mostly used for children’s E-storybook.
PORTABLE DOCUMENT FORMAT – Invented by Adobe Systems and published as .pdf. It is supported by most modern electronic reading devices and in most cases accepted as a standard format for an e-book.
PLAIN TEXT FILES -Provided by the Gutenberg project and published as .txt. It doesn’t support Digital Rights Management and formatting options such as graphics, fonts and colours. Almost every operating system can read .txt file.
RICH TEXT FORMAT – Published as .rtf is widely supported by many e-book readers and can easily be edited and converted to other formats.
Now that you have decided to publish an eBook, it is necessary for you to learn and understand the differences between print book formatting and eBook formatting.
Print publishing houses have a fixed format, the words, fonts and images appear on paper exactly where you want them to.
If you use the same format for an eBook, you will end up with a poorly formatted and unreadable eBook. E-books are designed to “flow seamlessly” which means your words and paragraphs will adjust, shift, reflow and look good on any screen size, be it a small smart Nokia phone or an iPad or personal computer screen. This seamless flow will enable your reader to customize the font sizes, fonts, and line spacing to suit their personal reading preference and device.
With print books, readers use page numbers to navigate. With eBooks, there is no “page” and it also uses hyperlinks to navigate. Navigation opens up exciting opportunities to make your words more accessible to readers.
BEFORE YOU CONSIDER PUBLISHING AN E-BOOK, NOTE THE FOLLOWING;
WHAT DOES CRATER LIBRARY & PUBLISHER PUBLISH
To see what we accept as our digital library content, see Terms and Condition page.
FORMATTING YOUR E-BOOK
First of all, always back up your files on an uncorrupted flash drive or cloud storage. ALSO, open your final manuscript within Microsoft Word, and create a copy of it by going to File: Save As: and then enter a new file name, such as THECRATERBOOK, and save it as a .doc file (the default in Word 2003 and earlier). In later versions, go to Save As: Word 97-2003. By making a backup, if you make any mistakes, you won’t mess up your original.
Extremely important! Never upload your work on Crater Library until it has been thoroughly proofread and edited for grammar, spelling and typos. Even if you are an English grammar professor, it is important to give someone/people with good editing skills your work for proofreading. Remember that one of the biggest criticisms leveled against self-published authors is that their work is not professional quality. Don’t perpetuate this stereotype. Be proud of your work and ensure others proofread and copy-edit your book prior to publishing it anywhere at all. This will encourage people to read your work and make your book more successful.
We recommend you type and format your work on Microsoft Word because it’s the easiest method to produce high-quality e-books that are readable on any e-reading device. It also allows modification and can generate your e-book in multiple e-book formats making your book readable on any e-reading device.
∙ For non-fiction, we recommend the following APA guideline for formatting your work.
Spacing: Double Spacing
Font: 12point for body
14point for Title of book
Font type: For letters – Time News Roman, Courier
For figures – Arial
Page Margin: 1” on all sides (top, bottom, left, right)
Paragraph Indentation: 5 – 7 spaces
Alignment of Text: Flush left (with an uneven right margin)
∙ When inserting your cover pictures, always recheck its size to ensure it doesn’t distort the body of your work. Cover images are optional as Crater Library can a generate two-colour basic cover page via Calibre but it is advisable you use an appealing cover as it helps sell books. You can Google free public domain images to select and download desire cover image. Your image colour must be in RGB (red, green and blue) colour and not CMYK (best for printing ink on paper)
Please keep your cover image tasteful and free of obscenity.
∙ To edit the size of your images, always save your file as a Word. Doc. Word .doc files handle images much more efficiently. If you’re using Microsoft Word 2003 or later, Word has a great feature that will compress your images without visibly harming quality. Just right mouse click on any image in the document, select format picture, and then under the picture tab in the lower left hand corner you’ll see a link for “compress”. This will compress many images 80% or more. You can also use a photo editing tool such as Photoshop, or a free utility such as Picasa by Google at http://picasa.google.com/. Please note: It doesn’t impact the file size to simply click the corner of an image and drag it inward. If you want to reduce the height or width of an image, it’s always best to do that outside of Word, and then re-insert the corrected image.
∙ To format poetry, flush left, or, if it’s meant to be centered, center by defining the centering in your paragraph style Do not use indents to arrange the text on the page, because the indents could cause your poems to appear too far to the right of the screen (or worse, word-wrapped) on small-screened devices. This is why we suggest flush left.
TITLE OF BOOK
YOUR NAME
©COPYRIGHT 2020 (i.e. year of publication) YOUR NAME
Insert Crater Library & Publisher license note and statement here, beneath your copy right. Copy and paste the statement below on your own page.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Crater Library & Publisher License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
Finally, check for errors before you publish. Review the following
FEEDBACK
I hope this guide is useful to you. Please, send us comments and suggestions so we can improve this style guide and capture your needs.
You can download our e-book APA templates for sample below
TLC Non-Fiction Sample template for APA
TLC APA FORMAT SAMPLE TEMPLATE
AND A TUTORIAL ESSAY ON MAKING APA ESSAY TEMPLATE HERE
To learn more about making your own E-books with Calibre and Open office softwares, download the sources below
USING MSWORD TO CREATE E-BOOKS