Where to start?

Hey Alison,

First things first. Have a look at the Practical Advice thread at the top of the board. There are loads of great tips.

To answer your first question. Finish the book. Read it over and have a tweak. Then get some beta readers to look over it and send you their comments. Make the amendments as you see fit, and then send it to an editor. That way you'll get the most out of the editor that you can. Sometimes it's possible to send work to the editor too early.

It doesn't really matter when you design the cover. You could do it before the book is ready if you want! It might help inspire your writing. Although the risk is that the book evolves away from your original concept.

Also have a look at cover designers. There are some reasonable cover designers with a lot of talent. I think I left a link to resources in the Useful Links thread on the board.

Leave formatting to the very end. Write the book in Normal style, with chapter headings in 'Heading 1' style. Don't use tabs and stick to one font.

If you search for Katie Elle, she left a great post on formatting ebooks. That might help.

Good luck!

Sarah

How is it bad that I tab? I tab out of habit.
The little, helpful video Amazon KDP provides shows how to do the automatic indent thing. I had that going for one chapter, but it didn't set back to that once I put in the next chapter title. So, I started hitting tab again.
Is this really going to be a problem?

mypalsim said:

How is it bad that I tab? I tab out of habit.
The little, helpful video Amazon KDP provides shows how to do the automatic indent thing. I had that going for one chapter, but it didn't set back to that once I put in the next chapter title. So, I started hitting tab again.
Is this really going to be a problem?

Click to expand...

If you're going to use your Word document to convert to ebooks formats, then it's a problem. You'll have to remove all the tabs and set the indents. So you may as well sort it out while you're typing, rather than doing it all afterwards (which is a lot more time consuming).

If you're planning to code the html directly, it's less of an issue... but it's still good to get out of the habit of using tabs for indents.

There's a way to do a quick fix, I think it's Find and Replace ^t for ^p

You can get a lot of help on formatting from the KDP forums ( https://kdp.amazon.com/community/index.jspa ). It's not as hard as you imagine, once you get used to it.

Polenth - Thanks for the advice. I. Am. So. Aggravated. Not at you! What I don't understand is WHY pressing tab is different than setting indents.
*deep breath*
I'll pretend it's algebra and follow the formula without asking questions because there's no point in trying to explain it to me. lol.

sarahdalton - I appreciate the advice, but I didn't understand any of that.

brianjanuary - Thanks. I've looked at those videos, and that's how I know that what I'm doing is different. What I didn't know is that the tab vs indent thing was that important.