Formatting

I can format both your print and ebook. My services are ideal for those authors who want their books, either print or digital, to have that little extra design oomph.

Note: Formatting is for works of fiction only. No children’s books or any non-fiction work.

E-book Formatting

Looking to take your e-book to the next level? Plain text e-books are fine, but if you’re wanting to make your book more like a print book in style, I can help you. Standard formatting for me will include:

• Embedded fonts for the headings (one optimized version for Apple and Nook, and another optimized for Amazon)
• Image glyphs for scene breaks that can match your genre or tone. Is your book a wolf-shifter romance, how about a wolf or paw print as your scene break image?
• Upcap for chapter starts
• Small caps for first lines of chapters and scenes
• Small cover image of your next book at back matter (and up to 3 more images)
• Author photo with bio

I also make sure the files are as clean of extraneous code as possible. In other words, I’m not using a program like Calibre to create this, I’m working straight in your HTML code and so every line of code is with purpose, which will help keep your file size down…

Click to see these samples enlarged. These are screenshots of ebooks I’ve formatted:

Pricing

First book in a series: $75

Instead of doing a graduated fee depending on length, I charge a $75 flat fee for the first book in a series. Why? Because a good chunk of my time is on finding fonts, finding artwork, designing how your chapters and scene breaks will look, and that time is the same no matter the length of your project. However, what this does mean is that if you also have me format later books in the same series, the price will be graduated.

Subsequent books in a series:

• < 35K words  – $35
• 36K – 65K words – $50
• 66K – 100K – $60

This will include the following:

• ePub and mobi file with specialized vendor links for Amazon (ePub recommended for upload to KDP, mobi for ARe or giveaways)
• generic ePub to upload to ARe, Nook, Apple, D2D, Kobo, and Smashwords.
• typo corrections (in the process I will be giving you a mobi file to proof. If you find typos you didn’t notice, I will make those corrections provided they don’t take me more than 20 minutes (I can get through a lot of changes in that time, so that should cover any you’d find at this stage. If you have more, it’s likely you didn’t have a good copyeditor and proofreader)
• Hyperlinked Table of Contents
• Embedded cover
• The design format we work out for your chapter and scene breaks
• Up to 5 images, not including your cover or scene break glyphs
• NCX

If you would like your backmatter to be vendor specific, with hyperlinks to that vendor, each vendor-specific epub is an additional $5

If you would like a PDF for reviewers and/or ARe it is an additional $30

Turn-Around Time

Once you book me for a time slot, I can have the first comp to you for approval within 1-2 days upon receipt of your document. After we work out the look and feel, formatting can be turned around in another 1-2 days.

Print Formatting

I’ll take your Word doc, or your formatted epub, and convert it to a CreateSpace-ready PDF, with the interior laid out with the same attention to detail as the e-books, with stylized chapter headings, scene break glyphs, and the like. I also go page by page and make sure the hyphens are breaking in a logical manner, that there are no rivers of text (sentences with too much space between the words) and that the widows and orphans meet a tolerance level we agree upon ahead of time. This page by page adjustment is labor-intensive and painstaking, so the prices reflect this.

Pricing

Cost to format your print book for first in a series is:

• >25K: $75
• 26K – 75K:  $90
• 76K – 150K: $115

Subsequent books in a series will be billed at $25/hour, but will be capped at the above rates.

If I already did the ebook PDF, take 20% off the print formatting price.

Turn-around time

2-3 business days from the time the look and feel is approved.