Inventing Reality Editing Service

Add page breaks to mark ebook’s chapters

Readers of paper books have come to expect that a new chapter begins on a new page, even if that means blank white space at the bottom of the page where the last chapter ended. As all of us live in an era where paper books still are part of our education and recreation, we want to emulate this nonverbal signal to readers when designing ebooks.

Accomplishing this is easy when developing an ebook in MS Word. Simply place a page break between the end of a chapter and the start of a new chapter.

To do that, in your ebook manuscript, place the curser one line below the last line at the end of a chapter. In the ribbon at the top of the document, click Insert. On the left side in the Pages section of the ribbon, click Page Break. When you do this, the curser will jump to the top of the next page in your document. You can delete any extra lines up to the top of that next page, but if you keep deleting onto the page where you were, you risk deleting the page break. Save the file, and you’re good to go.

The result is that wherever the last page ended, white space will appear below on it the ereader or app where the ebook is being viewed. The next page starts in the ebook at the top of the next screen that the reader toggles to.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

5 Great Quotations about Books

“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A book is simply the container of an idea – like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” - Angela Carter

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” - Jorge Luis Borges

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.” - Tahereh Mafi

“Books are the carriers of civilization...” - Barbara Tuchman

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Ebooks: The Now of Publishing

I originally had titled this entry “Ebooks: The Future of Publishing” but after editing changed it to “Ebooks: The Now of Publishing.” My original title might have been accurate in 2010, but since then digital books have come to be a major portion of the book market. They are now the primary way a sizable number of people read books, whether it be a classroom text or the latest airport novel.

More than 1 out of 4 Americans in 2016 read an ebook, according to a Pew Research Center report. And while use of ereaders has declined during the past five years, the reading of ebooks on tablets and smartphones have tripled and doubled respectively during that time. Further, more than third of Americans aged 18-29 read an ebook in 2016; the age group is the largest demographic to do so. Arguably, the habit will remain ingrained as they read books during the next six or seven decades of their lives. Indeed, during 2015, Americans purchased at least 204 million ebooks, according to Nielsen Bookscan and PubTrack Digital. While this has been flat for about three years, it’s still a remarkable number; just obtaining a 0.00005 percent share of those sales would push a title to more than 10,200 ebooks sold and to the top of most Amazon.com bestsellers lists for several weeks. Simply put, ebooks are not just a passing fad.

In addition, while ebooks and paper books largely are interchangeable, that is shifting. The same interchangeability was true of television and radio programming when people began buying TV sets in the early 1950s. But ebooks aren’t paper books any more than television was radio; they’re two different mediums for relaying information and entertainment. Today, ebooks can play videos and audio while linking to vast amounts of additional information, a limitation of paper books. And, just as television altered radio (How many dramatic programs are broadcast on your favorite AM or FM station anymore?), so ebooks are altering and shaping the purpose and function of paper books. The latter increasingly is the realm of celebrities and authors who are big names in their genres. Paper won’t die for many years to come, but like radio vis-à-vis television, its days as the primary way people read stories and nonfiction will wane.

Authors – whether novelists or nonfiction writers – who want to sell their titles in the years ahead will need to do so on digital platforms. And though precisely how ebooks will evolve storytelling or the presentation of information remains to be fully seen, authors need to learn the basics of ebook formatting now to both cash in on this market and to be prepared to take advantage of it during the next decade.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

27 Must-Know Tips on Formatting Your Ebook

Each part in the series includes three tips:
• Part I 
• Part II 
• Part III 
• Part IV 
• Part V 
• Part VI 
• Part VII  
• Part VIII 
• Part IX 

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

8 Tips on How to Format Your Ebook

• Select different fonts for paperback, ebook 
• Great tips for placing photos in your ebook
• How to create bulleted lists in ebooks 
• How to format drop caps into your ebook  
• If using MS Word, don't place tabs in your ebooks 
• What is a "text-to-speech" ebook?  
• What is the X-Ray function in an ebook?  
• What is an ASIN (and other useful things to know about it) 

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

4 Things You Must Know About Writing An Ebook

• Why you must publish your book digitally
• Basic guidelines for self-publishing ebooks
• Consider differences between paper, ebooks 
• How to determine your ebook's price 

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

9 Top Tips for Ebook Formatting

• Know parts of an ebook when creating one 
• Getting started with formatting your ebook  
• How to link your ebook's table of contents  
• How to create page breaks in your ebook 
• Skip headers, footers, page numbers in ebook
• How to format line spacing for an ebook
• Use consistent style on chapter, header titles  
• Add page breaks to mark ebook's chapters
• Consider exercising 'nuclear option' on ebook

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Five Things You Need to Know about Ebooks

• Will you take advantage of ebook's opportunity for innovative storytelling, content presentation?
• Ebooks differ significantly from paper books 
• Four main ways exist to present your ebook
• Two ebook formats dominate industry
• Know parts of an ebook when creating one 

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Pros and cons of using Smashwords for ebooks

A number of self-publishing companies exist, and most are rip-offs. Yes, they may turn out a quality-looking product, but they don’t get you an Amazon.com landing page for your title or you’re unable to sell your title across several platforms such as Kindle or Nook. Worse, they are extremely expensive.

Without a doubt, CreateSpace and KindleDP – both divisions of Amazon.com – offer the best deal, as they’re free and get you a landing page with high SEO and your book’s various platforms all linked, but they don’t get you on an ebook for Nook, iBook or Kobo. The simple solution is to also load your ebook to another self-publishing site that offers this option and that also is free, namely Smashwords.

Based in California, Smashwords was founded in 2008 as an ebook publisher and distributor. As of early 2017, the company had published about 440,000 books.

There are a couple of major benefits to using Smashwords. First and foremost is it offers one-stop shopping for all of the major ebooks formats (Kindle, iBook, Nook, Kobo) including ways readers can download them to their PC, laptop or tablet. That’s a lot easier than formatting a book for each of those vendors and uploading it at their website. Secondly, Smashwords gives you a nice landing page for your book that gets fairly good play on search engines. Even better, you really don’t have to do anything to promote that page to get a high ranking.

Of course, Smashwords, like anything, carries some downsides. One issue is its very finicky formatting rules. What is acceptable when uploading at Kindle Direct probably won’t cut it at Smashwords. That’s because Smashwords needs a format that works across-the-board for Nook, Kobo and iBook as well as Kindle. Getting your book formatted correctly can be frustrating the first time around. Another issue is that you’ll still need to upload your book separately at Kindle Direct if you want an Amazon.com page for your ebook. Though Smashwords can create a format that Kindle ebooks can read and shows up high on search engines, when most people want an ebook for their Kindle, they go to Amazon.com, which on search engines almost always shows up in a spot ahead of your Smashwords landing page.

Verdict: Use Smashwords to get your ebook on iBook, Nook and Kobo. If you format your Kindle ebook to Smashwords’ specs, all you’ll need to do is add a paragraph on your title page about Smashwords, and you’ll be good to go across several platforms.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

What is an ASIN (and other useful things to know)

Writers new to self-publishing often run into the abbreviation ASIN and find themselves confused. Is it the same as an International Standard Book Number (ISBN)? Does one need an ISBN if you have an ASIN?

ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number, a 10-character alphanumeric identifier used by Amazon.com and some of its partners. Amazon.com assigns every book (actually, every product sold at its website) a unique ASIN.

For the most part, the ASIN is not the same as the ISBN. Paperbacks published in the Untied States, for example, need an ISBN to be published and afterward are assigned an ASIN. Ebooks do not require an ISBN but if sold on Amazon.com via KindleDP will receive an ASIN. The 10-digit ISBN for international paperbacks, however, does match the ASIN.

A single product need not have the same ASIN. Sometimes a book will have a different ASIN when sold on a different country’s Amazon.com sites. In addition, the ebook version and a paperback of the same title and content have different ASINs; a digital book is considered a different product than a trade hard copy.

You never need to pay for an ASIN, so be aware of scams trying to convince you to that you need to do so.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Related articles

Make tables readable in your self-published book

Three ebook formatting tips, Part VII

Sell more ebooks by writing shorter ones