Cutting Your Hair, Killing Your Spouse and Formatting Your Ebook -- Reb MacRath

Let's start off with hair, since we all love our hair though we're often driven nuts by it. From (t)hair we can move on to killing our mates when they hate the books we love or don't share our craving for pasta. Luck allowing, we'll have time to share a few thoughts about ebooks. Okay!

You have four basic choices for cutting your hair:

1) You can cut it yourself.



2) You can go to the cheapest spot in town.




3) You can go to an old school-style barber who's mastered all the basic cuts and charges only a few dollars more.



4) You can go to a salon and pay designer prices for a more individual and expressive look.



You can shave have your pate or mow your hair down to a passable buzz cut. For anything else, though, you really should pay....top dollar to get what is best for your hair. Good, we're making progress here. And, because you're all clever, I know you'll have guessed that the same four options apply to the killing of spouses.




Once again, it pays to have the job done right and rein in our miserly natures. Agreed. But apply the same four options to formatting ebooks? Dissension begins.

Now, I know a few fine writers who do their own formatting. To a man and woman, they're technically adept. And they've taken care to keep their manuscript design very clean and simple. Even so, they're mistaken in claiming that anyone can do it. Even paid professionals can and do bungle the job. (I counted nearly a hundred formatting errors in the ebook version of a well-known writer's novel. Her publisher had formatted it.)

Substantiating evidence

1) After paying $25 to have my first (38,000 word) ebook formatted. I was alarmed to see the text on Kindle's online previewer. There wasn't much that wasn't wrong. The formatter insisted that the text would be perfect in the published version--my previewer was to blame, she said. Still, I pointed out, the formatted Word document she'd sent back to me showed exactly the same errors. Long story short: I spent hours trying to get the formatting corrected, but whatever she changed caused new problems. End result: the published book was readable and earned some fine reviews...but it looked like free verse with the faulty indents and line breaks. It needs to be reformatted by #4, below.

2) I paid $75 for a second formatter, who did my next couple of books. I learned, right off, that I'd been right: the formatted text does reflect what I will see on the previewer. The formatter did a fine job, but one that still required a good deal of fine-tuning. Even more fine-tuning was needed for the next book, but she made all changes quickly.  Moreover, I enjoyed the salon treatment--she connected me with some reviewers and touted my work on her website. But she was determined to retire in France by age forty--and she raised her prices dramatically while becoming less accessible. (I've since learned that she's stopped formatting altogether.)

3) The third formatter charged the same $25 as my first formatter. But her credentials looked rock solid, and I liked the way she worked: she lined up her projects a month in advance...then devoted herself to the project at hand. She did three books for me--with next to no tuning required. She represented old school barbering at its best. Yet I had to move on again for my new book, Red Champagne. This book required some 'extras' that #3 couldn't provide. I chose a salon with a difference.

4) Formatting of the new novel cost me $60--and, all in all, I couldn't have made a better investment. Red Champagne contained a slew of typographical choices I did not want to abandon. In a tricky story involving different time lines, I'd chosen several strategies for making it clear to the reader. To give you one example: I needed to isolate some sections of dialogue so that readers would know at a glance that a playwright was doing the talking. Decision: I wanted the dialogue in bold with 'stage directions' between her quips in underlined regular type. Formatter #3 had told me this wouldn't work because Amazon's automated what-nots would override the underlining--or, just as bad, underlining would like unprofessional. But formatter #4 insisted that saving the text in MOBI would prevent Amazon from overriding--and that underlining would look fine, far better than italics.. End result: for $60 I received exactly what I wanted...with a handful of glitches (all my fault) that were fixed in a matter of hours

 Closing Words in Praise of Pros

When the job has been done right, your baby will have brio. The spirit it conveys will say:




Consider these three points in closing:

1) Self-formatting is hardly free. You need to factor in the time and energy required. Let's say the entire process takes at least 12 hours (for a shorter novel). Are your freedom and time not worth the money it would cost you to have the job done by a pro?

2) Your odds of success at a discounted price are best if your text's style is basic: font: regular, bold and italic...none of Red Champagne's challenging tacks to set off important clues, etc....Your work can be perfectly formatted for far less than you think.

3) Even if you need to get the job done cheaply now, keep the salon option open. What you'll want to know, going in, is if formatting is something the salon owner does on the side or if it's something s/he rightly regards as an art. Next, you'll want to know if s/he can assist in other ways. For example: I have three remaining horror novels, written as Kelley Wilde, that I'd like to issue as ebooks. Unfortunately, they were not saved on discs. I couldn't bear the thought of retyping each from scratch, as I'd done with The Suiting. But my new formatter, Yvonne Betancourt, has the equipment to scan the actual book, converting it to Word. And she is willing to do this at an affordable price. Yvonne has also added proofreading to her menu.

So, let's hear it for good hair days...another night's peace with our partners...and perfectly formatted books.

Here's the link to Red Champagne, the book my fourth formatter proved could be done as I wanted:

http://tiny.cc/0tcoqx


Parting Words in Praise of the Number 50

Three writers have inspired me since December 1964, when I discovered them and chose to be a writer. For fifty years I hoped to channel and fuse the Big Three in one book--and I think you'll enjoy the ride.