E-book

Have you ever noticed typos in an e-book?

Maybe it’s not a big deal, but I’ve been reading reviews on Amazon lately and have found reviews where readers enjoyed the story but won’t buy another book by the author because of typos, grammatical errors, or bad formatting. That can’t be good.

If you’ve published electronically, you don’t want this to happen to you. But how do you avoid it?

After you’ve proofread, and proofread and proofread again, then had your novel proofread by someone other than yourself, there is another task you can perform to ensure high quality work.

I use Scrivener to write and recently found the feature that exports a manuscript into e-book formatting. I tried this and then sent my novel to my Kindle. I used to just send a word document to my Kindle and read my novel that way, but how could I know if the formatting was off?

Now with this feature, my novel is formatted as a reader would see it on their electronic device. Scrivener will export to epub (.epub), Kindle ebook (.mobi) or iBooks Author Chapters (.docx). I’m sure there are other writing programs that have the same function.

It’s interesting reading my novel for the first time in this format. I caught several errors in formatting; such as, no space after one scene and before the next. This might seem like an inconsequential error, but what if I’d confused a reader by not indicating when one scene ended and a new scene started?

As an added bonus, reading on the kindle makes my novel seem real.

Do you have ways to check your novel for formatting errors or typos?

See Proofreading/Copyediting if you’re interested in my in-depth process.

Thanks for reading . . .

The big question is: to self publish or go with a traditional publisher. #writetip #writing

My brother has just published his first novel: Maxwell Huxley’s Demon. He chose the self-publishing route. His book is available both in paperback and as an e-book.

Some say this is the easy route. After watching the amount of work Mike put into this, I don’t believe that’s true. He went through the same vigorous process of editing and proofing, of finding beta readers, of taking feedback. He found YA readers to comment before he published, making sure he had feedback from his target audience.

I decided on the traditional route and have an agent. Margaret Hart at the HSW Literary Agency is representing my work. This route involves the same amount of work my brother’s chosen route.

Mike and I are watching each other and learning from both processes. What we did learn is that we both love writing, so no matter what option you chose, if you love to write, the end result is you have created a novel. While we watch, scheme, plan and wait, hoping that Mike’s book takes off and mine gets published, we continue to write. That’s what this is all about.