With the current trend of indie authors heading into self-publishing, there are many “specialists” now jumping on the bandwagon and offering to “convert” your manuscript for not a lot of money.

Because of this, those writers and self-publishers looking to outsource this part of the process should make a point of getting to know what they’re actually paying for. There is a whole world of difference between ebook “conversion” and ebook “formatting”.

What “conversion” means is that someone is going to feed your Word doc into a bit of software which will grind it up and spit it out as a “converted” manuscript. You will then have to upload it to your publisher of choice and hope that the book that comes out looks and reads as you would want it to. It probably won’t! Why? Because it hasn’t been “formatted”.

Proper ebook “formatting” involves a bit of html and css knowledge. As a very basic guide, html governs the elements of the page, css governs how those elements will look, where they should be on the page and how much space is in and around them.

Then, when your book is published, it will look and read exactly as you envisaged. It will look like a book, not a web page.

Want to find out about how you can do this yourself? Click this link to go to Udemy.com and watch a free introductory video.

Got any questions? I’d love to help you, just leave your comment below.