This is the second installment describing how I converted my old novels into e-books. I’m hoping this information will help other writers interested in doing the same. Part one of this series mentioned (step 1) rights and (step 2) creating a publishing company, and went into more detail on (step 3) creating a cover.

Today we move onto step 4, preparing the manuscript.

Over the years I’ve made an effort to convert my novel and short story files into modern Word format, and about three years ago I did some major clean up work on the old files, so I was in a pretty good position when I started this project.

Styles are really, really important to the process. Make sure you are properly using styles in your manuscript and the conversion will be much easier. For example, all the text in my manuscripts goes under a custom “manuscript” style, which uses Times New Roman 12pt with a first line indent of .5 inches and double line spacing. You’ll want to change the actual styling later. The important thing is that the text has a consistent style. So to start, I use “manuscript,” “manuscript + italic,” and “manuscript + underline” (until I get rid of the underlines).

Stage 1:
I start with a Word document containing the entire novel, and inflict upon it a series of search & replace operations. I’ll list some of them, though it’s likely I’ve missed a few:

1. convert double hyphens to em-dash’s. There should be no white space around the emdash.

2. convert Word ellipses to periods with a space in-between each. Best to consult a style manual for the details, because there are details.

3. In the old days it was two spaces at the end of a sentence. These days it’s one space. I don’t know if this matters with an ebook, but I like to search & replace two spaces with one.

4. Fix up the line breaks. I continue to use a centered # sign to mark them because this makes it easier later.

5. If you don’t have curly quotes, convert them. I finally found the easy way to do this. Set up Word to automatically convert to curly quotes as you type. Then just search and replace double quotes with double quotes and single quotes with single quotes. Test first, but if all goes well, “Replace All” makes short work of it.

6. Convert underlines to italics. Search & replace does this too; you can search & replace using format only. Caution: for me, if an entire paragraph was set in underline, it would fail to convert to italic, so I had to fix these during a later stage.

7. Look for any other weirdnesses left over from old files (odd tabs, extra spaces, weird alignments, etc.) and clean them up.

Stage 2:
Next, I start setting up some additional styles.

1. Create a style for your chapter number. Name it “chapterline” or some such; just make it different from anything else. Simplest is to base it on the “manuscript” style but remove the indent.

2. Create a style for the first paragraph in your chapter. I call it “firstparagraph.” Again, based on “manuscript” but without the indent. I use this same style for the first paragraph after a section break.

3. I like to set off the first words in the first paragraph of a chapter and the first paragraph after a line break, so I set them in small caps. If you want to bother with this, then create a style for it. Let’s call the style “firstwords.”

4. Create a style called “sectionbreak.” I just set it to center text without an indent, but the important point is that you want the style mark-up so you can use it later.

Now go through the manuscript and apply the new styles throughout. It’s easiest to search for all chapters first—apply “chapterline,” “firstparagraph,” and “firstwords.” Then search for your section breaks (presumably marked with a # sign), and style the break, the first paragraph after it, and the first words.

Stage 3:
Your publishing company sent you the “foul” manuscript, right? You know, the copy of the manuscript with all the copy editor mark-up, and printer notes and such? And you kept it, right? Get that out now. Go through it page by page and add all those corrections into your Word file. If you have the same issue I have with underlined paragraphs not automatically converting to italics, now is the time to correct the problem.

Next—did you make changes in the page proofs? If you’ve got a record of those changes, load those in as well. If not, well, your e-book won’t be quite the same as the old hard copy.

Stage 4:
Prepare the front and end pages. I use a title page, a copyright page, a dedication page, and maybe an acknowledgment. At the end I have a “Books by” and “About the author.”

I suppose you can format them in Word, but you’ll wind up with a lot of styles. For my own, I just put these pages in a vanilla format, and fix it later.

And at this point, your manuscript is ready for conversion!

Next time, Step 5: converting the Word doc into *.epub format.

Posted on: Monday, November 8th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Categories: E-book How-to.