The Challenge

Today’s indie author needs to format three different books:

• one as an e-book, which functions more like a webpage than a physical book
• one as a paperback, which formats like printed pages and not as a webpage
• one draft ideally designed for revisions and editing

Visual authors with a good feel for what a printed page should look like tend to format a paperback book first with page headers and page numbers, then later try to remove all the page formatting and implement Word’s Styles to transform the paperback book into an e-book.

Others prefer the more text-oriented design of the e-book, then later try to add features that are relevant for printed pages.

Which method is better?

My answer is neither!

A Suggestion

Type the text and nothing but the text:

• Don’t use page breaks, section breaks, columns, or any other kinds of breaks.
• Don’t format…