The Secret is ... Make It Art

Of course it is.

Here’s the backstory: you know, if you’ve been reading these pages or fb, that I’ve been on a very steep learning curve to finally know how to format ebooks, and thereby no longer ever to run the risk of being cyberhamstrung by not know how to DIY. So now, I DIY ebook formatting.

You also know that a true gentleman, Jesse Gordon, www.adarnedgoodbook.com, very graciously helped me when I couldn’t help myself. If you need/want a real ebook formatter, he’s the guy.

So the basic thang about formatting ebooks is that what you’re really doing is overriding all the auto functions in Word. And, believe me, they’re legion. Really. So few of us have any idea about the back end of the software we use. Trust me when I tell you that Word’s is a doozy.

Interestingly, the pages that had me the craziest were the copyright pages because all my novels are based on musicals or operas, and I own lyric reprint licenses for them all because the solve of each mystery is through the lyrics of the songs. Well, lyric reprint licenses come with very  specific accreditation requirements and I couldn’t risk getting them wrong for fear that I’d lose the licenses.

One of the things you can’t do in ebooks is use the ribbon commands to make changes. They don’t “take” in ebook world. But you can and do need to use the Styles menu, and to create some of your own, to have the words appear on the page where you want them to appear.

EXCEPT ... I tried it. I did. It worked ... sometimes. And I still don’t get it, and Word kept overriding my special styles anyway (which was really annoying). So I, as I often do, resorted to my intuition, and asked my abundant brain to help me make the front matter and the back matter of each book look the way I wanted it to look.

Two days went by, and then, at a moment where I was distracted—not working, not really paying attention to anything at all, it came to me in a flash.

If you want it to look like you want it to look, sweet girl, the secret is to make it art.

Of course.

Well, I already knew how to embed art in my novels, and I use it all the time anyway to use special fonts for special things, so I just took pictures of the pages I was particular about with Paint, cropped them down to size with Microsoft Office Picture Manager, and embedded them like they were art. Duh.

After I fixed the first five books so they appear just the way I want them to appear, I realized that it’s just as true for life: the secret is to make it art. Every time.