Tag: Kindle

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Top Formatting Hacks Scrivener: Our Most-Used Tricks

Scrivener Formatting Hacks

Scrivener is a wonderful program many writers use to set up and manage their books, screenplays, and research projects. Nearly every aspect of the program can be customizable, from the drafting settings to the export format. But with so many options, many authors find themselves overwhelmed. To that end, we’re posting a blog series on our favorite features. While we could post fifteen blogs on the formatting features, today, we’ll just cover our top formatting hacks in Scrivener.

Note: The screenshots are for Scrivener 2.0. for Mac. We hear from our friends at Literature and Latte that version 3.0 is coming soon, and when we get access to it, we’ll update this post.

Hack #1: Scene Labels and Images

Scrivener formatting hacks: adjust compile group to show different documentsFor our Madion War Trilogy series, we had the challenge of multiple POVs. We wanted to label each POV with the character’s name and a unique icon. To accomplish this, we added a Custom Metadata field to our project and called it POV. Then, in the Compile settings, we added the following to the Section Layout under Prefix:

<$img:<$custom:POV>;h=50>
<$custom:POV>

In the Compile setting, you’ll see that the POV is listed there under Level 2+ (we’ll go into levels a bit later).

Scrivener Formatting Hacks

When we compile the draft, we get the POV name along with the image.

Hack #2: Preserve Formatting

Sometimes within the text, we want to preserve formatting. That is, the rest of the book is Garamond 12, single-spaced, left aligned, and maybe this one section is a letter, and we want it centered and Times New Roman 13. In this case, we have two options: We can create a separate scene and select “Compile As-Is,” or, the better option, we can highlight the text and use the “Preserve Formatting option.” You can find it under the Format menu, under the Formatting sub-menu.

Scrivener Formatting Hacks: Preserve Formatting

Here you can also find the Copy and Paste Formatting options, which allow you to take the formatting settings from one scene to another. Generally, though, you shouldn’t do too much in-line formatting in your final manuscript. And make sure if you’re using Preserve Formatting that you’ve got your formatting exactly as you want it.

Hack #3: Compile a Section

If you’ve taken our advice and kept all the books in a series in one Scrivener file, then you’ll need to know how to Compile just a section. Luckily, this is pretty easy:

Scrivener Drafting Tips: Compile Settings

In the Contents section of Compile, use the drop-down menu to select the grouping you’d like to export. Under Compile Group Options, you can select to either include the container (generally you don’t want to do this), and treat selected group as entire draft (generally you do want this).

You can also use a Filter based on a particular label. So, for example, if you were compiling a preview of an ebook, you could tag specific chapters with “Preview” and compile only those.

Hack #4: Compile Levels

Scrivener formatting hack: Scrivener 3.0 uses formatting categories instead of levelsA lot of folks are confused by the idea of Compile Levels. We’re happy to announce that in Scrivener 3.0, they’ve changed Compile Levels to a much more user-friendly version. As it stands now in 2.0, your Compile levels work like this:

  • Part (Folder) -> Level 1
    • Chapter (Folder) -> Level 2
      • Scene -> Level 3
        • Subscene -> Level 4

Each level can have its own formatting. So your Part would be different from your Chapter, and so on. In Scrivener 3.0, they’ve gone back to the drawing board. Instead of assigning formatting by level, you can now assign formatting by type. So if you’d like your Part and Chapter to share formatting, you can. And if you have a certain set of scenes with particular formatting (like a dream sequence, for example), you can set individual scenes.

As formatters, we’re looking forward to this new feature!

Hack #5: Getting a Clean Manuscript

Our last hack has to do with getting so-called “clean” manuscripts from Scrivener to editable formats like Word. If you’ve drafted your book in Scrivener, then you’re probably already mostly there. In the Compile Format feature, you can add additional so-called “presets,” or settings that you can re-use. This is especially helpful when you’ve got several books in a single manuscript, or if you need to export to hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and more. For exporting a “clean” manuscript, create a project preset using the formatting standards your editor requires. Usually, that’s 12pt, double-spaced letter-sized pages.

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The Matter of Things – All About Front and Back Matter

When coming to the end of a book, you’re often feeling a jumble of emotions. If it’s a romance, you’re feeling the Happily Ever After. A dystopian, probably a little misery mixed in with hope. Across all books of all genres, there’s one thing in common: That all-important book back matter and front matter.

Your book’s front and back matter is, essentially, the stuff that bookends the actual text of the book. The title page, your copyright information, and table of contents goes in the front, your acknowledgements, your also by, and your biography go in the back. If you’re a self-published author, all of these components make for yet another sales avenue.

Front Matter: The Basics

For indies, you’re going to want to have at least three main components to your front matter: Title Page, Copyright, Table of Contents. You could go for the gold and have all the components (half title, series page, title page, copyright, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, etc). However, keep this in mind: Nobody’s buying a book to read the front matter. Especially when it comes to eBooks, where you can display up to 20% of your book to potential customers, you don’t want 10% of that taken up by front matter.

Our general formatting recommendation goes like this:

Print Books:

  • Title page with author and publisher logo (if applicable)
  • Copyright information:
    • Editing by [Editor’s Name]
    • Art design by [Artist Name]
    • © [Year] [Publisher]
    • All rights reserved.
    • ISBN: [ISBN]
    • ISBN: [ISBN:13]
  • Dedication Page
  • (Blank Page, so TOC lands on the right)
  • Table of Contents
  • (Blank Page, so start of book lands on the right)
  • Start of Book

Our eBooks run about the same way, although we don’t add the blank pages. Per the Smashwords formatting guide, we also make sure to add the appropriate text so we pass muster on the Meatgrinder.

A note on Amazon and Front Matter

Amazon’s Look Inside feature allows users to view the interior of an eBook prior to purchasing. For a lot of consumers, that’s how they decide to press that Buy button. Recently, however, Amazon pushed a new standard for eBooks in the Look Inside feature that effectively broke a lot of formatting, especially as it relates to images and text alignment. All of our books, formatted through Scrivener, were victims of this change. If you’re a Scrivener user, try exporting the book to ePub instead of Mobi.

You might also try Vellum, which is another eBook formatter (Runs around $200 for eBook only).

Either way, it’s important to check your Look Inside feature every couple of months to make sure everything looks as it’s supposed to.

Back Matter: The Basics

Right after the last page of the book, you need to try to hook your reader to take an additional action, whether it be purchase the next book in the series or signing up for your newsletter, or even leaving a review. The more pages a reader has to sift through, the less likely they’ll hang around, so put your high priority up front.

For paperbacks/hardcovers, we go with the following:

  • Last Page
  • Our heroes adventures continue/conclude in [Book Title]
  • Also By, with a short blurb about each book
  • Acknowledgements
  • About the Author

For eBooks, which can include hyperlinks, we switch it up:

  • Last Page
  • Our heroes adventures continue/conclude in [Book Title], followed by the following:

As always, thank you, dear reader, for going with me on this adventure. As an indie author, I rely on my awesome folks like yourselves to help share the word about my work. Please consider leaving a review on your favorite book retailer*. I am so excited to hear what you think—even if it’s a short review!

*Smashwords has particular issues with naming other eBook stores in their books, so keep it generic

  • Free Anxiety Dragon Book, with the following:

Sign up for the S. Usher Evans newsletter and get a free copy of Empath, a standalone fantasy novel about a girl and her anxiety dragon.

  • Also By with links to each book in the backlist, and a notice if the book is also a free download.
  • Acknowledgements
  • About the Author, with links to social media

The Importance of Back Matter


If it’s not completely obvious, your back matter is one of the best ways to retain new fans and increase sales of new books as they come out. Whether it’s through finding you on social media or signing up for your newsletter, giving fans a one-click option to get more of your stuff is always important. Especially if you’re giving the first book away as a freebie or newsletter gift, you want to give yourself every possible chance to keep your hard earned fans.

We also recommend linking back to your own website, versus trying to do store sites. In the first place, if you’re using Smashwords or other distributer, you won’t be able to upload a different book for each store. But most importantly, it lets you link to books that might not be out yet. So if you’re planning books 3 and 4 later in the year, you won’t have to update your backmatter when they come out.

That also means that every so often, you should be updating your back matter with information about your new and upcoming books. If you’re a habitual releaser of 4-5 books per year, you can probably get away with once a year for heavy lifting. It’s also a good time to sweep across your paperbacks and hardcovers to make sure everything looks good, too.

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Book Release Strategies – Tips and Tricks to Maximize Success

So you’ve built your audience, you’ve established your presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more. You’ve been building your newsletter and your media kit is built. Most importantly, your manuscript has been reviewed by beta readers or a content editor, a line editor, and has a professional cover. Now, it’s time to talk about actually releasing that book! The book release strategies outlined in this post aren’t a one-size-fits-all, and some have worked with one book and haven’t with others. At a minimum, they’ll help you put together your own plan for success.

Six Months Out

Yes, really.

Right about when you finish that first draft, you should look half a year out and pick a publish date. This will give you plenty of time to go through the editing process outlined above, plus enough time to get everything ready. Keep in mind this is purely for planning a book release; you should be building your platform long before this.

When building your book release strategies, start with taking an inventory of all your assets. This includes your number of social media followers, street team, and other advertising revenues. Why? Because it will help inform the rest of your plan.

Your next step is to establish a budget. Take a realistic look at what you can spend to promote the book, recognizing that you’re investing in a product, versus just spending money. Include everything in this number–cover design, editing, and advertising. If you’re giving away books, count on shipping (international can run you up to $30). If you’re doing a street team competition, make a budget for prizes and shipping.

Then, put together your vision, objectives, and goals for the book. This planning method is one part thought exercise, and one part schedule-building. By starting at the 10,000-foot-view, you understand what you really want out of your release. And intention is key.

The book release vision can be something general (I want to release Book X on X date) or it can be specific (I want to increase sales/reviews/reach from the previous book).

Your objectives are the big rocks:

  • Have finished book ready for upload by X date
  • Obtain additional preorders by doing X
  • Continue to grow social media presence by doing X
  • Test (particular advertising service or marketing ideas)

Your goals are the specific achievements. There may be a little overlap for the objectives, but it’s better to keep them separated. Generally, we like to add actual numbers to the goals to have something to shoot for:

  • Book X will be released to editor on X date
  • Write 12 blog posts about the book
  • Grow reviews on Goodreads to 50
  • Increase Twitter to 2,000
  • Grow Facebook to 1,000
  • Preorder Goals: 100 on Kindle, 15 on paperback, (etc.)

Finally, put together a list of tasks for each goal. This is where your asset inventory and budget come in handy, because you’ll have a list of tools readily available. For increasing preorders, you can create a task to seek out 10 book bloggers for a cover reveal tour, using your Twitter or Facebook followers to ask for help. To increase Twitter following, set a task to find and strike up a conversation with five people per day, etc. Make sure you’ve got space for contacting people, especially if you’re setting up a blog tour or asking for guest posts.

Use a GTD system like ToodleDo to put your tasks in order and add a completion date to them. And now you’ve created a project plan!

So go execute that plan.

Three Months Out

As we chatted about a while ago, Amazon will only let you upload a book 90 days away from your publication date. Therefore, we like using that as our official “marketing kick-off” date. Here are some of our favorite ways to celebrate this milestone:

  • Conduct a cover reveal blog tour: Include:
    • The cover (obviously) but also a short snippet of the book
    • Your own social media and author photo
    • A giveaway on Rafflecopter with entrants signing up for your newsletter and following you on social media
    • Links to preorder the book. We recommend sending users back to your website, as you may not get access to Amazon’s link until a day before the blog tour goes live.
  • If you’re doing physical books, you can get early copies from Ingram. Find a few Instagram bloggers and see if they want to feature your book for a cover reveal.
  • Start your weekly blog posts. We’ve found the sweet spot for daily blog posts is about 6 weeks, but at 12 weeks, you can start sharing one day per week. Ideally, you should have all this content written and scheduled ahead of time.
    • Start soliciting guest blog posts from authors in your genre
  • Encourage your street team to spread the word, as well as your followers. People will be more willing to share new information than older information
  • Create a light schedule of social media posts with links to buy your books. It’s better to have secondary content (blog posts or Instagram photos), but the occasional tweet about the book is fine.
  • Start a Goodreads Giveaway
  • Announce the cover to your newsletter subscribers
    • If your book is 100% ready to go, you can grow subscribers by offering a sneak peek at the first chapter by signing up. Recommend that you align this sign up form to a new list so existing subscribers can get access, too.
  • If you’ve got a little money to spend, or you’ve got some know-how, put together a book trailer and post it to YouTube
  • Make your book available on NetGalley or send it to reviewers and your street team

For the book itself, if you really want to encourage preorders, set it at a special price of $0.99 until release day. You’ll have to determine if the lower profit is worth it, but we’ve seen three times as many preorders at that price, versus full.

Six Weeks Out

Now is when you kick your blogging from weekly to daily. We like to have a mix of content, including posts written by and about others:

  • Mondays – A topical blog post about something related to the book
  • Tuesdays – Sharing a snippet of the book for #TeaserTuesday, either on the blog or on Amazon
  • Wednesdays – Guest blogs from other authors in our genre
  • Thursdays – Character profiles
  • Friday – #FridayReads, sharing a short review (positive) about other books in the genre

For the blog posts focused on the book, make sure to end each blog post with the cover and how to buy. Use a program like CoSchedule or Buffer to promote the blog posts, and use all your assets in your inventory.

At this point, you should start seeing some reviews come in from your street team and book bloggers. Feel free to share these as appropriate. It goes without saying you will probably receive some lower ratings, although some bloggers don’t share these until after release. Don’t engage or respond to them. Just share the higher rated ones.

You can also use the six week mark to start a Street Team competition, encouraging your team to post their reviews and/or comment on your social media for points to win prizes.

Six weeks is also where you should be setting up all the channels you want to utilize on release day. If you’re doing a book blog blitz on release day, now is when you solicit bloggers. If you want your book included in new release lists, reach out now.

Week Of Release

At one week out, you can increase your social media advertising, both paid and unpaid. You also have six weeks (or more) worth of content to re-share at this point, so reuse the best-performing content.

The night before release, we like to do our Twitter Chats. If we’re promoting a series, this is the time when we do a cover reveal for the next book in the series. If we’ve got it available, we’ll also share the preorder links.

Release Day

This is where your asset inventory really comes in handy. On release day, make sure you’re utilizing every tool and channel in your arsenal, from YouTube to your street team to your personal Facebook page (be careful with this one; Facebook is persnickety about selling from your FB page).

  • Encourage your Street Team to share photos about the book on Instagram, and tweets with #bookbirthday on Twitter.
  • Release a newsletter with buy links and information about the next book (if applicable)
  • Use that same content on your blog, and set up a one-day release blitz with other bloggers
  • Re-share your best performing, non-blog content (Instagram photos, videos, reviews, other blog posts, etc)
  • Send an email to the bloggers who have left early reviews on Goodreads first thanking them for doing so, and then gently reminding them to cross-post their reviews to Amazon
  • Set up eBook advertising for sites that will accept new books
  • If you’ve set your eBook at $0.99, remind your followers that the price is increasing soon

Post-Release

First, congratulations! You’ve worked very hard up until this point and you deserve an adult beverage of your choosing.

The main difference between indie releases and traditionally published ones is the release curve. For Trad pubbed kids, your sales look more like a bell curve. There’s a big boost at the beginning, and then (for most), it dips significantly. For indies, the curve looks more exponential. Even with all this work, you may release your first book to lackluster sales. But that’s why you have ten more waiting in the wings, right?

Our experience is it takes a minimum of three books for a series to take off. So if the first book doesn’t sell well, don’t panic. The old adage goes: Your frontlist sells your backlist. Besides that, you’ve created a whole lot of content that you can use and reuse for the release of the next few books. You’ve built your network more by connecting with more reviewers and growing social media. All of this work you’ve done will pay off, but it make take two or three books to get there.

To keep up the momentum, set up a regular schedule of eBook advertising. We’re big fans of focusing on one book every three or four months, getting about $30 worth of eBook ads, and letting them do the work. Occasionally, if we have other books on sale (like the second book in the series), we’ll also share on our social media. The “tail” of sales lasts for about 90 days, and then it’s time to do it again.

But by then, you should be ready to release your next book, right?

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The Smashwords Meatgrinder: Not As Scary As It Sounds

You’d think that Smashwords would’ve come up with a less grotesque name for the system used to convert .doc into the various formats they sell, but here we are with Meatgrinder.

If you joined us last week, you read all about Smashwords and how we think it’s a good idea to diversify your eBook distribution outside of Amazon. While there are other services you can use (such as Draft2Digital or going direct to the vendors themselves), we’ve stuck with Smashwords. Inevitably, that least to the following question:

How do I deal with the Meatgrinder?

To avoid the Smashwords Meatgrinder, upload a finished ePub fileBack in the olden days (read: 2014), Smashwords only allowed authors to upload manuscripts in .doc formats. Then they used a proprietary conversion software to turn that Microsoft Word file into a .mobi (for Kindle), .epub (everyone else), .pdf and more. The problem was this software required the .doc file to be clean and formatted properly.

Now, if you’re someone very familiar with Word, you know all about paragraph settings and headings, and how to create a table of contents. If you’re not, the Meatgrinder was a huge barrier to entry.

Nowadays, Smashwords allows authors to upload an .ePub file directly, which is what SGR-Pub does when we have a tricky manuscript with difficult formatting, such as the Razia series. Since most vendors accept ePub, this makes it easy. Our recommendation for those authors who have their manuscript in .ePub format is to just upload that, making sure that it passes all ePub checks. Most files created with Scrivener will pass this with flying colors.

(Need a formatter? Check us out.)

What if I want a .Mobi?

Smashwords says that .mobi (Kindle) is one of their most popular formats on the Smashwords direct store, so some authors may still want to deal with the frustration of the meatgrinder in order to have .mobi file available for sale. Smashwords has a Formatting Guide that you can download, but here’s our top trip-ups that we’ve encountered.

  • Tables: For our Razia series, we have tables for bounty posters and whatnot. For both the .ePub file and the .doc files, we have to create “images” where the tables are. Luckily, our formatting program of choice, Scrivener, allows us to create images from tables in the Compile settings. Otherwise, you’ll have to individually create the images from your tables.
  • Paragraph settings: Many authors add 5 spaces or a tab in front of each line. There are a few reasons why this is a bad idea, but the biggest is that it doesn’t pass Meatgrinder specifications. Check out this handy article for how to create paragraph settings in Word.
  • Table of Contents: Related to paragraph settings, the Meatgrinder wants your table of contents to link to Chapter Headings. Therefore, instead of making each chapter title 24pt and bold, you’ll create a new Heading Style, and apply it to all your chapter headings. Then, you’ll be able to create your Table of Contents.

The Style Guide has more in-depth discussion of all these topics, so download it!

Why All This Formatting Stuff?

Think of your manuscript like a web page and the Meatgrinder like your web browser (Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc). In order for the browser to render the web page correctly, the back-end coding has to be correct and free from extra spaces and errors. The same goes for the Meatgrinder: In order to render the book the right way, the back-end code needs to be right.

What back-end code, it’s just text, right? Well, not really. Line spacing, tabs, and weight, italics, and size of font are all coded into the Microsoft Word document. You don’t see it because Microsoft gives you buttons and pop-up windows, instead of expecting you to know all the coding. So when Smashwords asks for a clean manuscript, they want all of that to be system-generated, instead of user-generated.

Other Things to Know with Smashwords

Smashwords is a great distribution service, although it is persnickety. Take care in your front and back matter to not mention Kindle specifically (i.e.: if another book is available through Kindle Unlimited) and also to not link to other stores. Back matter sells books (we’ll write a blog about that soon), so it’s important to use verbiage that won’t trigger a flag on your book. We recommend something like “This book is available for eBook, paperback, and hardcover” and a link back to the book page on your website.

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