The Formatting of My E-Book Has Gone Wrong

Software packages have their own, special quirks — as do different e-readers and e-retailers. If your e-book turns out looking quite different from what you wanted, you might need to do some troubleshooting.

Always allow plenty of time for formatting your manuscript correctly, especially for your first e-book. Preview the text on at least one physical e-reader device (such as a Kindle or NOOK), and look at it using e-reader software on your computer. If it doesn’t look quite right, do your best to fix it.

Keep these points in mind to handle formatting gone awry:

One common cause of formatting problems is the special character. After I created my first e-book in the MOBI and EPUB formats in Calibre, I found that all the quotation marks had been stripped out. They were present in my HTML file, but in the form of smart quotes (known as “curly” quotes). The solution was easy: I used the Find and Replace feature in Word to change all smart quotes to straight quotes, and then I repeated the conversion process in Calibre with the Smarten Punctuation option selected. It doesn’t sound logical — but it worked. (See Chapter 8 for more on converting files in Calibre.)

Characters such as en-dashes, bullet points, or copyright symbols may not display incorrectly in your MOBI or EPUB e-book file. If this is the case, replace these characters in the HTML version with their corresponding ASCII codes. Don’t worry if that term doesn’t mean much to you — plenty of lists of ASCII codes are available online.

A particular type of formatting simply may not translate well into MOBI or EPUB format. The Kindle, for example, has only two font faces — a standard serif font and a monospaced code font — so if your manuscript involves several different fonts, you can’t replicate that on the Kindle. You may have to rethink how to display text. In my novel, the print version has sans serif text in certain sections, and the digital versions use bold text instead.

If you’ve spent hours struggling with the conversion process (or if you simply want to avoid it), you can outsource this task for a small fee. Bear in mind that lowball conversion offers are usually too good to be true — you may find that your manuscript still has errors and problems. Ask around for recommendations, and ask to see examples of manuscripts that the company has formatted for other clients.