Using LibreOffice to Format a Novel – Part 5: Converting your Manuscript into an eBook

As long as you’ve only formatted using Paragraph Styles, you shouldn’t have any problems converting it to an ebook, and you should have no problems with the ebook file being accepted by your publishing service. You’ll need to remove some of the formatting that’s not ebook compatible, but as long as you haven’t been a ninny with your formatting, you should be fine.

When creating an ebook, your aim is to keep formatting as simple as possible so the manuscript can be read by the various ebook readers out there. The main thing is to remove any formatting that is too decorative, like drop caps and borders around the paragraphs or page.

Basically, the only formatting you want to stick to is things like italics, bold, underline, and aligning the paragraphs left or right or centre. Most other things should be removed. The aim is – in a sense – make your manuscript look like very basic type on a fresh LibreOffice document.

You should not have any uses of the tab key in your novel, no emojis, etc. If you have any pages with more than one column of text – like a newspaper style layout – the columns should be removed and the text displayed as a simple style similar to Default Paragraph Style. You can still add separate Paragraph Styles for different parts of your manuscript, but they need to be simple headings and paragraphs.

One thing to bear in mind is that there are different types of ebook files for different ebook readers, so your aim is to produce something that will work universally.

Re-Formatting

The first thing you need to do it to make all your pages into Default Page Style. Since the manuscript will be read on an ebook reader, you don’t have to worry about pages appearing on the left or right side of the book. So different Page Styles are redundant, and some ebook readers might not be able to read your novel if you included different Page Styles.

You can keep pages like the chapter title pages but they need to be Default Page Style, like all the others.

You *should* be able to convert all pages to default by pressing Control + A to select all, then in the Page Styles side bar double click on Default Page Style. However this doesn’t seem to work. It might be because of the Manual Page Breaks throughout the novel.

Instead, go to each page that isn’t a default style, place the text cursor on that page, then double click on Default Page Style in the sidebar. This should be easy, because it should mostly be your chapter headings and first pages that need changing.

The next thing you do is delete all the non essential pages. Any blank pages should be taken out. You can keep pages that tell readers about other books you’ve written, but the title pages should be removed; they’re not needed.

Modify the Default Page Style

You need to simplify things. The manuscript will appear on a digital display so you need to get rid of the different margins for left and right. Your Chapter Title pages can stay as long as the Page Style is Default. They will just be single pages that show only the chapter title. But you should replace the Chapter Title Paragraph Style for a Heading Paragraph style (see below).

Modify the Default Page Style and go to the Page tab. Change the Layout from Mirrored to Right and Left. You must turn off both the header and footer, and get rid of any borders or any decoration. Then even off the left and right margins, making them 2cm both sides or something similar.

As I mentioned earlier, you can keep the page size as a book size; you don’t need to put it back to default A4. It doesn’t matter if you go back to A4. In fact, you can just copy and paste your manuscript into a fresh document for that. But I have found that keeping the book sizes can produce better PDF book files.

On the Smashwords publishing service I used to use, you (for some reason) can’t manually upload a PDF version of your book (at least, the last time I checked you couldn’t). When you upload your Word file (yes, it has to be a Word file) it automatically converts your document to various formats. Most conversions are fine, but the PDF just looks like text on a boring A4 document. It’s not pretty and it’s not easy to read. So by keeping the book size makes the PDF look better. It’s easier to read than an A4 page and it looks more like a novel.

Smashwords was bought out or something by Draft2Digital, which is what I use now. This service is a lot more flexible and accepts the LibreOffice odt files.

Copyright Page

You might need to make sure the page with all your copyright information is the first page of your manuscript and you must follow the guidelines for whichever service you are using.

On Smashwords, for example, the first few lines should be the copyright and author name, the year published and the name of the publishing service you are using. You can (and probably should) begin with the title of the book at the very top of the page, but in the case of the attached image, I didn’t bother with the title for some reason.

Then underneath all that, there is a general legal-ese statement about warning readers not to try to sell or share the book. This was taken from the Smashwords website but you can add your own ‘Pay me money’ and ‘Don’t let AI read this’ statements if you like.

Modify the Paragraph Styles

So you need to modify the Paragraph Styles. For your Default Paragraph Style you can pretty much keep it as it is. You have to be careful which font you use for ebooks because some fonts don’t convert well. Minion Pro, the font I usually use, is fine so I leave it at that. However you might have to change your font. If you’re unsure use good old Times New Roman.

The font on ebook readers can be changed to the readers’ choice so the font and size doesn’t matter much.

However, for a recent upload, I had formatting issues after I tried changing the font. Libre Office can be a bit glitchy and you’ll find some paragraphs don’t automatically change when they should – for some reason. So it’s best to select your entire manuscript – i.e. the novel section, excluding the front matter part – and directly assign the font and size to the whole thing. This stops any random font changes.

You will then have to manually change titles and headers if the font and size are different to your main text body. I’d suggest selecting the titles and clearing the direct formatting (select the heading, right click > Clear Direct Formatting). Then use Paragraph Styles to change the heading styles.

You might want to make your headings a sans serif font so they stand out a bit more. Just make sure you use one of the basic, common, really boring fonts out there, like Verdana or something. You can find lists of basic fonts you can use. It doesn’t always matter if you use a font that is not one the standard basic fonts, the ebook reader will just ignore it and display something else instead. The main thing is to play it safe to avoid issues..

For your Chapter First Paragraph style, remove the Drop Caps. You can still keep things like a wide space above the paragraph, but perhaps don’t make the space too large because you won’t know how some ebook readers will handle it.

Instead of Drop Caps, you can remove the indent on the first paragraph. This is a nice way to make the first paragraph stand out, and, of course, you can also do this style for your printed manuscript.

Alternatively, you can make the first sentence all in capital letters.

Headings

You don’t strictly have to, but you should change your Chapter Title Paragraph Styles to Heading styles. Formatting for ebook readers is a little bit similar to HTML where the main parts of your page are Headings and Body text. If you look in the Paragraph Styles sidebar, you will find some styles called Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. You can use these for chapter titles, and for various headings and subheadings in your novel.

As I said, you don’t have to use Headings, but it’s good to. Some ebook readers will automatically create chapters every time a Heading style is used by creating a page break before the Heading. This means the Heading will appear at the top of a new page.

I like to use the Heading styles to help ebook readers make sense of my manuscripts. But they also come in handy when manually creating a Contents page.

Simply change all your Chapter Title styles to Heading styles, then change the formatting to your liking.

[End of Transmission]

Tune in for Part 6 to find out how to create a Contents Page with hyperlinks.