Do You Really Need An E-book Formatting Service?

Several companies that offer e-book editing services also offering formatting. While having your e-book edited is an absolute must, should you also pay to have it formatted?

Whether you need to pay to have your book formatted greatly depends upon the type of book you’ve written and how comfortable you are using Microsoft Word. A basic work of fiction, without charts, illustrations, pictures or a table of contents, is extremely easy to format in Kindle. Anyone with even the most basic computer skills should be able to handle it.

When publishing to Kindle, formatting is almost completely automatic. You’ll have to download a couple of programs, and the Kindle help site gives you step-by-step instructions, which are clear and easy to follow.

To successfully format your book, it must first be correctly formatted in Word. Kindle uses Microsoft Word 1997-2003; documents end in .doc. To format in Word, you’ll need to insert page breaks between chapters (just go to “insert” then hit “page break”). Hopefully, when you’ve written your book, you formatted to automatically indent paragraphs. If not, you’re going to have to do it manually and that’s a pain in the neck. It’s easy, just tedious and can be time-consuming if you have lots of short paragraphs.

Here’s what you do: Highlight your entire document, go to “paragraph” and click on “special.” Choose “first line” in the drop-down menu, which should automatically give you a .5 indent. Unfortunately, if you did not indent properly while you were writing your book, you’re going to have to go back and insert those indents. Here’s how: Go to the beginning of every paragraph, backspace, then return.

Single space your document for best results. Other than that, just make certain you don’t have page numbers or headers or footers in your document before you publish. Kindle does have a program that allows you to preview what your book will look like before you publish it. That way you can see if something is wrong and fix it. If it’s a total mess and you don’t know why, then hiring a formatting service is probably your best bet.

Several articles online complain about the difficulty of formatting for Kindle. That was not our experience at all, but our books were text only. Kindle handles your Word formatting, including italicizing, ellipses, paragraph breaks, etc. We’d recommend that only those who have trouble formatting in Word should pay to have their book formatted. If you can figure out how to format in Word, you can format on Kindle.

Formatting services aren’t cheap, charging as much as 50 to 75 cents per page or more—that’s in addition to editing costs. Before you pay someone, try to do it yourself. If your book doesn’t publish correctly in the Kindle preview program, it’s money well spent to pay for a service.