The Formatting Process

At the same time (or shortly thereafter) please email the following (cover art in a .jpg , .png, .bmp or .gif file and the front matter and excerpt material in .doc or .docx) to format@athirstymind.com.

Cover art, front matter (Copyright for book, cover art and cover art photo copyright, first publish by whom, acknowledgment, dedication) excerpts from other books and website links are sent by email for inclusion in the ebook. The conversion cannot be completed without this material.

Now the book is ready to begin it's process of conversion and distribution to millions of readers all over the World. If you're interested in such things you can study the following process, or you can just skip to the important stuff...the price!

1. The print book is scanned using a sheet-feed scanner and converted into a ".pdf" file which is a picture of each page but is not editable

• Scanning into a .pdf file is fast and straight-forward. It will give an exact "picture" of your print book

2. Using OCR (optical character recognition) software (OmniPage) the ".pdf" is converted into an editable text document (.rtf)

3. The text document is filled with strange formatting and includes many errors in punctuation as well as text. This step is called "cleaning" and begins with removing quirky OCR weirdness such as optional hyphens. After these are removed, the document is copied into Notepad, then copied back into a blank Word document which has already been set-up with 1" margins on a letter-size page, all body text in Times New Roman and all paragraphs indented 0.25 inches

4. Now the document is ready for proofing and comparing the output to the original text. This step is the most time-consuming and, depending upon the length of the book, can take anywhere from 5 to 25 hours. But we're fast readers here at A Thirsty Mind!

5. After proofing the text, the book is formatted using Style sheets in Word. This process is necessary to get the final output in the ebook to be professional looking without any surprises in appearance

• At this step, the client may add material to the book or edit the content

• The "look" of the book is decided upon at this step. But SIMPLE is the rule

• Fonts must be kept very simple in order for all eReaders to be able to access the text, although Font size is not as important as eReaders can be customized for the comfort of each eReader owner. Some eReading devices also allow the choice of fonts within the eReader

• Multiple fonts in a book may be problematic. No more than two should be used

• Styles are decided upon here (Scene Changes, Chapter Headings, Titles, front matter, Bonus Chapters, Excerpts from other books, etc.) This includes spaces above and below title and headings, indent for all paragraphs or flush left for first paragraphs in each Chapter and after each Scene Change

6. After formatting is completed the file (Word .doc) is emailed to the client for their approval

7. When the client is happy with the final Word file, the file is then saved into a Webpage Filtered (html) document and the coding is verified and validated within several online sources

8. The book is now ready to convert to several ebook formats ... ".epub" for most eReaders such as Sony, Nook and others, and ".mobi/prc" for Amazon Kindle. The files (the formatted Word document, an html file, epub and mobi/prc files) are emailed to the client so that they may begin the process of publishing their book to the appropriate ebook stores (Smashwords, B&N, and Amazon)

After the eBook files are complete, the client may contact A Thirsty Mind for help in uploading the files to the appropriate venues. Most authors upload their eBooks in the Word.doc file to Smashwords which converts through their "meatgrinder" and then distributes to smaller venues plus Sony and Apple then the epub file is uploaded to Barnes & Noble (through PubIt) and the mobi/prc to Amazon (Kindle Digital Publishing).

There are specific guidelines for a document uploaded to Smashwords, so the Word.doc that an author receives will not look like the final output that the epub and mobi/prc files give. There will be no page breaks, and the Styles will be greatly simplified. You may choose to use Smashwords for some or all of your distribution. Talk to other authors and look carefully at the Smashwords site.

Of course since you are your own publisher, you must do your own marketing. And marketing is the key to selling your product online. If you don't use Facebook, Twitter and the other Social Network sites you might want to think about them and start designing a marketing campaign for the Social Network sites when your eBook is up and running.