HOW TO FORMAT AN EBOOK - Basic Formatting With Word & Draft2Digital (EPUB)

so what is the easiest and simplest way to format your ebook that is what we're going to be talking about today we're going to be talking about how to use draft to digital to format your ebook now of course draft to digital is also a print on demand company that distributes ebooks as well so you can use draft digital to distribute your ebook but you don't have to you can use it just purely for formatting your ebook my name is Mandy Lynn I make weekly videos on the business of being an author if that's something you're interested in make sure to subscribe and hit the Bell notification icon so you never miss a new upload thank you So today we're sitting at my desk because I'm going to give you guys a tutorial of uploading your book to draft to digital and formatting yearbook on draft digital so by the end of this video you'll know how to make an Epub file of your own book I'm talking a book that doesn't have any photos or complex formatting and it mostly just has regular chapter headers if you want to know how to format more complex books that require a little bit more customization when it comes to formatting make sure to check out my book formatting course in my book formatting course I teach you how to format your book for print and ebook using Adobe InDesign which I personally feel is the best book formatting software out there so I will leave that linked down below I also have a video that you guys can watch if you're not familiar with Adobe InDesign and you maybe have some questions as to why it's such a good book formatting software anyways let's talk about formatting your book with draft to digital so first things first we're in Microsoft Word and I have my book open this book is meet me at the summit and you can see I've already got some front matter going on in this book and it's not formatted yet but you can see there's a couple different things that have happened before chapter one start so what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna go to file and save a copy so I can have a new copy of this book so I'm just gonna label this as meet me at the summit and put draft to digital which is D to D abbreviated and then just hit save that way we're not ruining our old document so what I'm gonna do is I just want to have just the chapters of my book so I'm gonna go scroll up and highlight everything that comes before chapter one and hit delete and then delete again until we just have chapter one here so as we're getting our manuscript ready for draft digital we want to make sure it is very basic formatting where we have a very clear bold all caps for the chapter and then the rest of the book is just regular font that's nothing fancy and I'm also going to go to the end of the book and now we have our acknowledgment section the only issue of what's going on here is that the acknowledgments which is meant to be a header is the same font as the body of the text so if we uploaded this to draft to digital it actually wouldn't be able to see that this is supposed to be something separate from the rest of the book if I highlight to chapter one and go to my Styles you can see that the chapter header is this style here which I actually labeled as chapter title so I now want to go down to the acknowledgments again highlight the acknowledgments header and then change it to the chapter title header um and I'm also just going to center it because I know that's supposed to be centered now the logistics of what font style the header should be doesn't really matter as long as it's the same and consistent throughout the entire book and also as long as it's not matching the body text that's really all we need when formatting our book on draft to digital we need the body text to be one thing and the chapter header to be another thing now I can also see that for some reason this is in a different font everything else is in Times New Roman and this paragraph is not so I'm going to highlight the entire thing and then just change it manually to Times New Roman and I'm also going to change the font to 11 and I can also see it looks like the color might be off as well this is just a weird little glitch in my manuscript that actually happens with a lot of people so that is all fixed now and I'm just going to hit save and our manuscript is now ready to be formatted in draft to digital so this is direct to digital as you can see I've already got some of my books on draft to digital if you don't have a book on draft to digital yet you're going to hit the add new book button I however already have started the uploading process for me me at the summit on draft digital so I'm gonna go ahead and just edit the existing files that are in here so because I've already started the uploading process you can see I already have a lot of information already pre-filled out but because we're talking about just the formatting process we can kind of ignore everything else so in order to format your book The first thing you have to do is upload your final manuscript so we're just going to hit that browse button and find the word document that we were just working on all right so I know this is the right one because it says draft to digital on it I'm going to hit open and you can see it's just loading in right there while it's loading you also can go ahead and hit the edit shared metadata and cover and just make sure that the cover is the correct file uh and if you're publishing your book through draft digital you're going to want to fill out all of this information as well I actually have a tutorial on how to format a print book through for draft digital and how to publish your book through draft to digital but today we're talking just about ebook so that all that's important here is having the correct cover and having the correct manuscript uploaded and then once you have that we're just gonna hit save and continue again I'm not going through a full tutorial for draft digital because I've actually done a tutorial for draft to digital before and the tutorial was specific for print and now we're just talking about formatting your book for ebook through draft to digital so now we're on the next page and we can see that draft digital has been able to detect our chapter layouts so because we did the different formatting for the chapter header versus the body text it was able to see where chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3 and so on start and we can even scroll down and we can see that it also was able to pick up the epilogue and the acknowledgments now if this information wasn't correct what you would do is you'd click help these aren't my chapters and it gives you the option of kind of being a little more particular about your formatting in case draft digital wasn't able to pick up on it correctly now because my formatting was so simple and straightforward it actually only picked up on the correct option but if you had a more complex manuscript you'll have a couple different options here and you can click on them and if these still aren't correct what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to go back to your word document modify your word document upload it back to draft to digital and see if it picked up on it then so going back to where we left off over here off to the left is just the additional information we can add like we can add in a title page we can add in a copyright page we definitely want a copyright page so I checked that off dedication I know my book has a dedication so I could paste it in here like so uh I can also do the also by when you publish through draft digital because you have your other ebooks up on draft digital it can actually Auto generate your also by page so it's always like super up to date and as you publish more books on draft digital it'll update your also by page so that is awesome so what we need to do is just tell them where we want the also by Page whether we want it at the beginning of the book at the end of the book or both I'm just gonna put both because why not drafted digital also does email notifications this basically is a newsletter through draft to digital now you can check this box off if you want or you could just add in your own uh email newsletter sign up yourself uh a teaser would be you can add in a teaser of another book that you've published through draft digital so if you check that off you can just go down here and say what book you want the teaser to be for me this is uh the book we're working on right now is meet me at the summit so naturally I want the teaser to be book two which is let the rubble fall so I'm going to click that and then you can also add in an about the author page um now when you create an account through draft digital in the settings you actually write your own about the author page so if you do that you just click which profile that you're working with so for me I do Mandy Lynn but if you have like multiple pen names that's what this would be in the drop down is all your other pen names and then if you also have an about the publisher page you click that here but again this is information that you fill out Elsewhere on draft to digital's website so you have to fill that stuff out first if you plan on checking off these little boxes so now I'm going to hit save and continue and it's actually going to go ahead and give us an ebook preview of our book so here's our preview and this is the very basic uh default draft to digital simple one and we can see chapter one starts and then the book starts and we can click through and then chapter two so I want to go back so we can see all the other things going on here so this is the copyright page that I requested to be added in and as you can see it all auto filled based off of the information that we added of the book on the details page so if any of this information is incorrect just click on this details button and you'll be able to update that whether be like the publisher date or the ISBN that you need to update then next we have the also by page right now my also by page only has maybe at the summit because I actually don't have any of my books published through draft to digital I publish exclusively through Kindle unlimited so that's why we don't see my other books here but if you publish all your books through draft digital you'll see all of your books pop up here but you can also see it links to my website as well and then we turn the page and we have our table of contents where readers can click to wherever they would like and we click through all the table of contents and we have our dedication and then the book itself starts so let's go to the so I'm gonna take you guys to the acknowledgment section so this is our acknowledgment section it's formatted just like a regular chapter and then we have this is the page that draft to digital gives us where you can sign up to the newsletter through draft to digital obviously it looks really cool it also has this fun books to read link and if we click on it we can see this is a page that uh draft digital creates that is like a custom newsletter sign up page through draft digital I think this is really cool and you can take advantage of this if you want I personally think if you're gonna do this that you should just have a link to your own newsletter because you'll you have full control over your news letter so just make sure you add a link to your newsletter in your manuscript that you upload to draft to digital and if we turn the page again this is the teaser that we added in of let the rubble fall so it says did you love meet me at the summit then you should read let the rubble Fall by Manny Lin so this is beautifully formatted and we have also the cover and then after the cover we have the blurb for let the rubble fall and then after the blurb we have a link to my website I just wanted to pause in and add a little tidbit because as I'm editing this video I realized that I may have misunderstood things on draft to digital originally I thought that draft digital only allowed you to link to your author website but I realize as I'm editing this video that I don't have any books published through draft to digital and so draft to digital views me as not having anything else published so even though let the rubble fall is technically published through draft digital's eyes it's not so if they don't have a link to my book to put at the end of the blurb so I just wanted to let you guys know that there is a possibility I can't confirm it 100 but I am pretty sure that if you do the sneak peek feature with a book that is published it should link directly to the book so people can go to a retailer to buy the book and they don't have to go through your website and like click through your website and explore to find a link to the book so after this little preview we have one more thing which is the also buy section once again because we selected the also by section to be at the front of the book and at the end of the book and then I also forgot after the also bisection we have the author bio this is not my updated author bio and this is not my updated author photo so this is very old so if you find this is out of date just go to your account settings and you can update all this information so now that we have the layout of our ebook let's customize the chapter headers so we're back at chapter one and this is where this right hand panel comes in handy because we can customize things and make them fun so we have a few different templates like the draft to digital simple or the modern watercolor and you can see when we do that we have a drop cap we have a little piece of art and then if we select the corner decoration you can see that come up Deco and I don't know how to say that but it looks really cool then we have minimal uh so these are all the all-purpose templates and then down here these are specific to genres we have a mystery thriller like a clue classic mystery Nevermore Grime uh under the romance section we have Midnight Oil subtle Hearts sweet bow under the Science Fiction and Fantasy we have digital Echo fantasy Hardline I don't know how to say that Regal dragon uh and then under non-fiction we have draft digital block and textbook and also make sure when you're selecting these different um these different templates if you click through you may notice like I don't have any in this first chapter but if you have scene breaks uh the scene breaks change from template to template as well so I'm just gonna click subtle heart because this is a romance book and you can customize things so this is um editing how the beginning of the chapter looks like we have the drop cap or we can have the phrase crap where it capitalizes the first couple of words or we can have nothing where it's just regular I personally really like the drop cap and then this edits the scene breaks okay I'm struggling to find a scene break in here if you do have a scene break you can edit the same way whether you want the beginning of a new scene to have a drop cap phrase cap or nothing so once you've done all that if you just wanted to use draft to digital to format your book and you don't actually want to publish through draft digital what you do is you'd hit the Download ePub option and then it downloads the Epub file to your computer and you're able to use that Epub file to then upload to KDP or any other retail websites and it should be perfectly formatted you also see that we have download PDF and download Moby download PDF is just so you know you can view on your computer download Moby Moby is the file that Kindle used to use for ebooks but they're actually moving away from it and they actually prefer epub files now so you can download your Mobi file but you don't have to I recommend doing the Epub file because that is the most universal so all you do then is you just download the file and distribute it however you'd like and then if you are publishing through draft digital all you have to do is click off this little box that that says you've reviewed the manuscript and you proved to release it for distribution you hit save and continue and then on this next page here you're just selecting where you want to distribute your book through so you can do all of this if you already have your book published on Amazon through KDP do not check off this box but then you can distribute through script and through Kobo and through these other Library services and you can edit your price that you want to sell your book at here as well and then once that's all said and done you hit the submit button to submit it for publication but again if you're only using draft digital to format your ebook you're never going to need this page you just download the file on the last page you're on which is right here you just download the Epub file there so that is the quick and easy way to format your ebook through draft to digital I did it the simplest way possible where I only uploaded my chapter files and my acknowledgments but you can also create your own end matter so you can customize having a link to your newsletter at the end of your ebook or just customizing the teaser at the end of your ebook as well but if you don't want to do all that customization draft to digital does have the feature where they do it for you as well if you want to watch more videos like this make sure to check out my entire beginner's guide to self-publishing a books playlist otherwise that easy and I will see you all next week

Channel: Mandi Lynn - Stone Ridge Books

Views: 23,550

Keywords: mandi lynn, how to format a book, how to format a book in word, how to format a novel, how to format a novel in word, easy book formatting, novel formatting, book formatting for beginners, book formatting tutorial, ebook formatting for kindle, ebook formatting in word, easy ebook formatting, how to publish a book, draft2digital tutorial, how to self publish, draft2digital amazon, self publishing tutorial, draft2digital review, how to format your ebook, self publishing

Id: FJUmg2S67AI

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023