Publishing Erotica Part 7 – Formatting the Interior

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 6 – Rewrites and Editing

So you’ve brainstormed (masturbated enough) to come up with a hot, filthy, kinky erotica that will melt every eReader that downloads it, you written it, you’ve edited, and you are ready to publish. Now you face the dreaded formatting the interior.

Now you might be asking what’s the interior? Well, it’s everything between the covers. Your book. But it’s a lot more than just your story, there’s your front matter (title page, copyright page, acknowledgments, lists of other works) and your back matter (sneak previews of other stories, a list of your catalog, a call to action to sign your newsletter, and your author bio). Sandwiched in between those is your story.

A story you have to format. Your book won’t magically look amazing on an eReader if you don’t format it properly. And to do that you need to learn Style Sheets. Now not every word processor program has style sheets (I believe Google Docs does not) so at some point you need to use a program that does (see earlier blog post on What You Need for a list). Style sheets are amazing. They can make your life so much easier if you know how to use them.

A style sheet applies formating to your text that ebook creators will recognize when creating your ebook (which is really just a webpage using HTML and CSS programming). It handles the paragraph indenting, the space between lines, the space between paragraphs, etc. Most word processors have a style and formatting section. You want to be in the paragraph styles, which your program should default to. You will notice defaults like Heading 1, Heading 2, First line indent, Text body, etc. These are all defaults that you can use to build with.

Now with books there are two ways to handle your basic paragraph formatting. Method 1: You can have your paragraphs indents and then have no extra space between paragraphs. Method 2: You can have no indents and have extra space between paragraphs. Method 1 is preferred for fiction and Method 2 for none fiction. Both methods should have single-spaced text. But you can go with what you chose. Just stick with it.

I use Method 1 with the first paragraph without indent (a common formatting style, just open any professional book [and there are plenty of indie books I would count as this] and you’ll see the start of a new chapter or scene is not indented, then subsequent paragraphs are]. And I find it very useful to have my style sheets set up before I ever start writing. So I have a style sheet called First Paragraph.

As you can see on the screen, there are five boxes that you can put in a measurement in inches. Before Text will indent every line that number. Typically leave this at 0.0 unless you want to have a paragraph indent in to make it stand out in text. After Text will indent the paragraph on the right margin, shrinking the amount of space it takes up on the page. I would avoid using this on ebooks but it could be useful for a print book. First Line will indent the first line of the paragraph. This is how you make a paragraph be indented without hitting tab. I have it 0.0” because this is the first paragraph of a section. Above Paragraph and Below Paragraph are how you control the spacing above and below the text. I find this useful for my Headings and Scene Break styles. If you go with Method 2, you would want to have a value in one of those boxes, probably Below Paragraph to create the extra between your paragraphs. When I finish typing my first paragraph and hit enter (return on Macs, I think), I have my style sheets set up to start my main paragraph format.

So if you notice at the top of the screen there are various tabs to allow you to do other forms of formatting. You can set the font and font style (bold, italic) the justification (left, right, center, etc), and other specialized functions. The tab Organizer (Now this is probably different in Word, but I don’t own that program) has four boxes. The first, Name, is the style’s name (in this case First Paragraph). Beneath that is a box Next Style. This box will default to the current style sheet. But if you changed it, like I have on First Paragraph, to another style (My Text). When you hit enter, your next paragraph will automatically start that format.

This is useful. I have my Scene Break style sheet set to go to my First Paragraph style sheet which leads to My Text style sheet. For chapter titles, I use Heading 2 set at 14 pt Times New Romans. I have Heading 1 for my book title at 16 pts Times New Romans (the font doesn’t matter for ebooks, the eReader sets the font used for the text and can be changed by the reader). But different font sizes does transition. You want to use the Style Sheets labeled Heading 1 for book titles and Heading 2 for chapters. The table of contents is generated by searching your text for those specific style sheets, including the NIX table of contents on an eReader.

Formatting as you write saves you so much time. Now if you’re wondering about good amounts to set your paragraph indents and other formatting numbers (I use 0.3” for my indents) check out the Smashword Style Guide. It’s a free ebook that is invaluable for nuances of formatting.

If you don’t format as you go, you have to go through your text and change style sheets. This is annoying because italics or bolds will often be deleted. You’ll lose any centered text, etc. So if you have it all ready to go, you can save yourself so much heartache and have a faster publishing.

Once you have your text formatted, you need to add in your Front Matter. First is your title page, have the book title, a series or any subtitles, and your name on this page. Then put in a page break (holding ctrl enter) to start a second page. Then comes your copyright page. You need to have a standard boiler plate. I use:

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Published in the United States of America, 2016

All characters depicted in this work of fiction are over the age of eighteen (18).

I included the age disclaim because writing erotica. All your copyright page has to say is who owns the copyright and that you’ve reserved all rights. For people outside of America publishing in other countries, you may have to do something different. You can Google for other examples of copyright blurb. Also on this page, I have a list of my social media, attributions to my cover designer, my photo license information for my stock photo.

Next I have my table of contents for the book. OpenOffice, Word, and other robust word processor programs will allow you to create a table of contents. It will search your book for all Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. in your book and create hypertext links to them. If you’re making a print book, disable the hypertext links since, obviously, it’s not a digital copy and won’t work. This is why you need your book title, your chapter titles, on Heading style sheets. You can mess with the settings to delete the page count, and other settings to make it work right for your purpose.

Next, and this is important for erotica, is a short excerpt of the sexy parts of the story. This is for the look inside on Amazon. People can see the erotic parts and have an idea of your style and if the goodies are worth reading. Other genres should do this as well and have an exciting part of the book to hook readers in.

My last page before the story I have a short list of related books either in the series or similar themes, a mini-bibliography. These links are all hypertext links that when licked on will lead to the Amazon book store.

Then you have your text itself. For short stories, I like to have the title of the short story as a Heading 2 centered before the first paragraph to let the reader know the story itself has begun. At the end of my text, on the same page, I include usually two links. One is a link to the next story in the series. I use a redirect site, Tiny Links, to make a short link that initially leads to my blog. When I publish the next story in the series, I can go to the sight and change where the short link leads to (the next book on Amazon) without having to change the short link in the book. This way I don’t have to re-upload a new copy and run Amazon’s review gauntlet and risk getting adult filtered or banned. My second link is a call to action to sign up for my newsletter. Both links are at the end of the text and use large text to be noticeable.

Now we’re into the back matter. I typically have a preview of a related story with a link to Amazon to buy it, then a list of my other works that would be of interest to anyone that read this story, then I end with my Author bio.

Once you’ve had your book put together, you need to make an ebook. Now depending on where you’re publishing, you can simply save your book as a Word 97 or higher .DOC or a .DOCX and upload it to Amazon or Smashword. For shorts, the .DOC is just fine for Amazon. But if you are publishing a longer work with multiple, you should make it into a .mobi ebook first before uploading it. This way you can have a NIX table of contents. Uploading the .DOC to Amazon won’t generate one, but for an erotic short it’s not necessary. See my previous article on What You Need for a list of software to make ebooks with.

I talk about links inside the book. Interior links are a great marketing tool. Readers can easily find more stories of yours for them to read and getting them to sign up to your newsletter is a way to directly market to people who enjoy your work. You should make an Amazon Associate Account and then those interior links can also generate you ad revenue. It’s not a lot of money, but if someone clicks on your link and buys your book, Amazon will give you a small referral fee for doing what you would be anyways—advertising your book. I make between $30 and $40 a month just from advertising for Amazon as part of my own promotion.

There is a second form of interior formatting, and that is for print book. That is an entirely different beast from an ebook. You will need to get into page formatting, footers, learning about the gutter margin, choosing your fonts wisely, spacing, it’s a beast and outside the scope of publishing short erotica. If people are interested in learning about publishing on Createspace or other print-on-demand companies, comment below and I’ll write an article on what I’ve learned from print books.

Click here for Part 8 – Designing Your Covers!