Ebooks, ebook, ebooks. That’s all writers are talking about these days. How to best take advantage of the opportunity available to them, perhaps for the first time, to release their works the way they want to release them, thanks to the growing popularity of ereading devices like the Kindle and Nook.
But with that opportunity comes responsibility to do it correctly and so writers everywhere are trying to learn everything they can about the best ways to produce, release, and market their ebooks. Formatting, of course, is one of the most popular subjects. After all, if your book looks like &%$#, then no one is going to buy it, right?
Guido Henkel (author of the Jason Dark supernatural pulp series) has taken pity on the rest of us poor struggling technophobes and has been putting out a terrific series of posts explaining the how and why behind proper ebook formatting. I’ve 
found the series very helpful and urge anyone with an interest in the ebook process to check it out. I liked it so much, in fact, that I asked Guido for permission to repost each installment of the series here at Rockyourwritingcareer.com. Today’s post, part one of the series he’s calling Take Pride in Your Ebook Formatting, kicks the series off in fine style.
Take Pride in Your Ebook Formatting (Part One)
To me, one of the key elements that sets apart a professional eBook release from that of an amateur has always been the technical presentation of the book. Sure, anyone can write a document in a word processor, run it through some export tool, use a fully automated conversion utility or peruse the services of an online service, but the sad fact of the matter is that none of these approaches typically results in, what I call, production-level digital books.
So, why are people using them? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and observing how other authors approach their eBook publishing, and the more I examined it, the more I have noticed that there are generally two reasons for it.
The first reason is that many authors simply don’t know any better. They write their book, complete it and look for the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to deploy it. Don’t be one of those authors! It is a sad testimony in my opinion, and certainly not a valid excuse. You have labored over your book for months, maybe even years, you have read and re-read it countless times, cleaned out typos and grammatical errors, massaged the style and worked on the structure, grinding away in the wee hours of the night alongside holding a daytime job and maybe having a family. You did not get here just to break the first cardinal rule of book publishing:
Don’t get sloppy on the home stretch! It will reflect poorly on your work.
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