Authors Can Be Stupid: $500 ebook design for free!
09. Feb, 2010 
11 Comments
One of the things that keeps being said about self-published ebooks is that they lack professional book design. This is short for “they look like crap.” As you are aware, I have two ebook readers, and I’ve purchased commercially available ebooks from traditional publishers. Those designers are no great shakes, for reasons I can’t fathom. What most of you don’t know is that back in the 1980s, while working for Flying Buffalo, Liz Danforth and Pat Mueller dragged the entire game industry into the realm of professional layout and design through the work they did on all of our products. I was fortunate enough to learn from them the arts of typesetting, layout and design.
So, here are the quick and easy rules for making sure your ebooks (especially epub versions) don’t look like amateurish crap.
1) Get a book on coding HTML, or cultivate a friendship with someone who knows this stuff. There are a couple coding tricks you’ll need to know. Most ebooks work off HTML, so if you can do it on a web page, you can do it in an ebook.
2) Choose a font. For the sake of simplicity, just use Times New Roman. (If you are picky about fonts, experiment, but be aware that not all devices support all fonts. Times New Roman is supported.) Font size is irrelevant since the joy of ebook readers is that the owner can change font size.
3) Prepare the text by reducing it to single-space. And justify the text. Nothing screams amateur like ragged-right text.
4) Do not put empty lines between paragraphs (the way most webpages like this format themselves). That looks like crap, doesn’t look like any print book anywhere, leaves tons of blank space and makes for weird page spacing. Instead you will indent your paragraphs, just like in a physical book. The code is easy to write and I use the measure of 1.5em. (I know, looks like code. It is, and you or your HTML-savant friend will put it right where it needs to go.)
5) Instead of putting in a blank space to suggest the passage of time, find a small illo (even just a straight line) to drop into that space. I have disks upon disks of copyright-free illustrations. I pick one appropriate to the story and slip it in as my break spacer. If you use the same illo throughout the book, it doesn’t add much to the file size. I prefer .pngs, but .jpgs work just fine.
6) Your cover should not be representative, it should be iconic. The cover for 
The Silver Knife was done by Kat Klaybourne and is just such an iconic image. It reduces great to an icon for the iPod/iPad interface and is attractive enough to catch buyers’ eyes. It is the bestselling of the titles I have on through the appstore, in fact, because of this cover. (Doesn’t hurt that the story rocks, too… Mycroft Holmes, Jack the Ripper and a lot more. A *lot* more.)
Put that all together, add the cover to the front of the file, convert it to the Kindle format, or any other format, and you’re set. A professional looking book that will look as good as or better than anything coming out of traditional publishers.
Also, it might not hurt to learn Photoshop or Gimp either. Both of these programs have tons of tutorials out there on YouTube and can be used to quickly put together decent looking cover designs more intuitively than writing HTML, at least in my opinion. With a little practice, creating a great-looking, iconic image will the easiest part of crafting a story.
Gimp: http://www.gimp.org/
Photoshop: https://www.photoshop.com/
Not a bad idea. There are some authors with the skills to do that. Me, I prefer to let someone with graphics’ skills handle that end of things. Thanks for the links.
For ebooks I’m partial to Arial personal since it’s a sans serif font. Serif seems to work best in the print world and sans serif seems to work best in the online world. Also I think nearly everything supports the Arial font. Another good one is Georgia, which was designed specifically for reading off a screen.
VigRoco, I designed my novella cover in GIMP (I heart GIMP), though I chose to have future books professionally designed because I don’t have the font skills for covers to make it look good. Though KEPT is selling at a decent clip on Amazon, so despite my font-fail it must be attracting people in some way. Professional design for future books was a personal preference. Also it saves me some time and is just one more thing I don’t have to fool with.
Why not LaTex? Its far better suited for writing books than html because it was created for doing that. It is IMHO even easier to learn and you simply get more out of the box. e.g. index, tableofcontents, bibliography, …
http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html
You write a master document once and reuse it for future books. Afterwards you simply write the chapter title and chapter text. When you are finished you generate html/pdf/whatever from the latex book. There are converters for pretty much anything available.
For graphics, in case you have no idea where to start, http://www.deviantart.com/ is a good site. There are some very good artists there. I would assume that most of them would be willing to sell some of their work or even create something from scratch.
Christoph, the main reason for not LaTex is simply stated on the page to which you link: LaTex is about getting the info right, and not getting the look right. Unfortunately, since stories are retail products, look is a huge part of the package. In addition, the formats supported by ereaders today are epub, PDF and Kindle/Mobi. Palm’s pdb files would be a distant fourth. Okay, .doc files are in there, too, but I don’t think many writers want to be sending .doc or .rtf or .txt files out into the world for others to mangle as they will. If we want to actually sell content, we need to put it out there in a format that ereaders can actually use, otherwise it’s like selling cans of sweet-goodness without selling can-openers.
Thanks for the art source recommendation.
You misinterpret the text on the page
Latex is totally about getting the look right. That is its purpose. What they want to say is: Writing the book should be the hard part, not formatting it!
LaTeX is based on the idea that it is better to leave document design to document designers, and to let authors get on with writing documents. If you want/need do both, thats fine. As an author, you write the content, as a document designer you define the layout for pdf/html.
Of course, its a lot of work to learn Latex, but not more than learning html/css. And you can create PDF or Html from the Latex document with ease. Not sure about epub/Mobi/Kindle. That might be a problem. I guess plasTex should do the trick.
Btw.:The idea of writing a book in html(or with winword) gives me the creeps.
There is a GREAT article on how to design eBooks from InDesign at this link – then you export and make it an EPUB from which you can create a format for any type of reader, including Kindle.
http://www.creativepro.com/article/making-ebooks-indesign-part-1
Robin, thanks for the link. At $700, InDesign is kind of pricey, but if you have access to it, glad to know it works.