Hello Book Lovers and Authors,
When you self-publish or work with an inexperienced layout artist, there are certain mistakes that make your ebook look bad.
Unlike print publishing, which is a centuries old industry, ebooks are fairly new, with only about twenty years worth of history.
Despite it’s youth, it’s based on very strict rules. Each format has it’s own quirks, but the industry standard is Epub and it is based off HTML and has a detailed set of rules. You can find the Epub3 rules on the W3 website.
There are plenty of ways to generate your ebooks and the following will help you avoid issues.
*The information in this post is up to date as of publishing, but things move fast.*
5. Not validating
This is only an issue if you’re creating your own ebook from a computer program instead of a service like Draft2Digital.
There are hundreds of issues that could affect the ability of your ebook to be read or even accepted by the major platforms.
If you don’t want to deal with downloading anything, you can validate on the Draft2Digital site even if you don’t use their service.
Unfortunately at this time, a lot of services (Looking at you AppleBooks) will refuse to publish the newer, better, and cleaner version of epubs. Stick to Epub 2s and you’ll have a wider distribution.
4. Getting Fancy with Fonts
Ebooks are very simple by design to make them easy to use on different platforms. They will not accept more than 2 beyond basic formatting changes to a font.
What that means is you can have your font Italic, Bold, Underlined. Beyond those basics you can’t have more than 2, I even recommend not having more that 1.
For example, the font can’t be bold, highlighted, and shadowed. I had a client whose chapter titles were highlighted in black with white font and a line underneath. Ebook programs automatically changed it to white text on white, which sucked. So we needed an alternate styling for the ebook.
Most people will use their ebook reader’s default setting which replaces fonts to avoid legibility issues. Don’t be fancy or spend too much time on look.
3 .Not including Page Breaks
Ebooks, mostly, are supposed to be flowable. What that means is they can change what’s on the page depending on font size and flow to the next page.
If you don’t include page breaks, every page will flow into the next and ereaders that calculate page counts per chapter won’t be able to.
Note: some programs like Calibre and services like Draft2Digital use your heading structure to create breaks automatically.
2. Static Layouts / Images
With a few exceptions, your book should be flowable, not static. That allows people to increase the font and not worry about missing pieces. Some exceptions are comic books, picture books, and art books.
The greatest sin you can make in an ebook is to use an image instead of text. It means that screen readers can’t read the text, readers can’t increase the font, and it’ll probably look fuzzy.
1. No Headings, No Table of Contents
Headings, Headings, Headings!
They are the most important structural element of HTML and of Ebooks. Every word processor has them. Use them.
Without headings, an ebook doesn’t get a table of contents. That means it doesn’t have any way of navigating between chapters. It could also mean no chapter page counts or no page breaks.
A book without headings or table of contents looks unprofessional, but could pass validation and might still be accepted by the various platforms.
A good Layout Artist will make sure that all these things are taken care of and that your book looks great. See Why Your Book Needs a Layout Artist!
Print books have their own standards see the Top 5 Book Layout Mistakes.
I offer layout services if you ever need help.
Good reading and good writing,
Éric