Now that I’ve uploaded Make a Move to Smashwords and it’s been accepted to the Premium Catalog(ue), I can share a couple of mistakes I made that, hopefully, will prevent you staying up until the early hours of the morning in order to fix them. Formatting text for digital distribution is completely different than for print, primarily because digital editions don’t really have any formating, and the little they do have is prone to being removed by the target eBook reader. I spent a LONG time making sure the first paragraph of each section and episode didn’t have a first-line indent, as I hate the way indentation looks at the top of a section, but the .mobi (Kindle) format hammered them right back in without asking. It also indented my section headers and left-aligned my copyright page content. Oh well – the message is more important than the medium.

But, two of the issues in the uploaded text were a result of my mistakes, and fixing them took a long time, so pay attention to the following points and save yourself some pain:

• As I said above, formatting for eBooks is different than for print, so if you’re going to be producing both printed and digital copies of your books, take copies of the source files before you start to format either. I wasn’t planning to produce an eBook of Make a Move until I realised I was being a dumbass, so I had to create the digital text from the fully typeset, ready-for-print Word doc. This meant I had to remove/re-add paragraph breaks, and track down the three instances of manual hyphenation I’d added to override the automatic settings. The only way to find those manual hyphens was to Edit > Find, and given that each of my sections (around 180 of them) are formatted as 1-1, 1-2 and so on, it took A LONG TIME.
• When you’re creating a text (Word) file for upload to Smashwords, the only way to be sure you’ve stripped out all non-normal styles is to either Edit > Select All and then Clear Formatting, or to past the whole text into a text editor (Windows Notepad, Apple TextEdit, etc.) and then paste it back into a Word document. This will remove ALL formatting, including any that you wanted to keep. Like italics. I forgot about the italics, which left me searching the print-formatted document for them, the trying to find them in a digital copy with no page numbers. There’s an hour of my life I won’t be getting back. So next time I’m preparing a digital copy of the source text, before I remove all formatting, I’m going to search for all italic text and add XXX or whatever in front of it. Then, once I’ve cleared the formatting I have something to search on in trying to find those instances. The same applies for underlines, bold, whatever – just use a different prefix for each type.

Yeah, they might seem like simple tips, and mistakes that could have been easily avoided, but hindsight is 20×20 and all that, so maybe you can benefit from mine.