Book design is about so much more than the cover these days.
Lately, the publishing industry has literally been inundated with news about the rise of the e-book this season and the predicted death of the bookstore and the printing industry.
Retailers of print books continue to be hit hard while digital sales have gone through the roof.
So, let's get past the cover for a moment and assume you've got a cover and jacket material that is award winning, spectacular and jumps right off the shelf and into the cart.
The first thing you need to do is totally eliminate each and every preconception you ever had of what constitutes a "book.
" Digital publishing is the Anti-Christ for traditional print authors.
It's a different game and there are different rules.
Let's go through them one at a time.
1.
Pages Don't Exist The first rule of digital is that pages don't exist.
If you actually have an e-reader, you can probably wrap your head around this to some extent.
But this truly goes against what it is to be a writer as we measure our genius in page numbers, and it's hard to get over.
Every e-reader is different.
If you try to create pages, you will bang your head against a table over and over again.
You just cannot make it come out right unless you completely eliminate the concept of pages from your brain.
When separating chapters, add one - maybe two - extra lines and type out your chapter title.
2.
Formatting is Evil Again, this is a rule that goes against our mindset as writers.
We toil and sweat to create a thing of beauty, only to be told that we are not allowed to make our books look the way we want.
There's really an excellent reason for this - the reader.
E-book readers are geared to allow the owner to customize the way the material looks.
It's your audience who gets to choose things like font, font size and the like.
Not you.
Take out all of those tabs, all of the extra lines (except one or two separating chapters), and even the fancy font.
Choose simple fonts, a "normal" paragraph style, left aligned, and single space everything without extra space after the paragraphs.
If you want to make your life easier, get rid of any columns, tables, text boxes or footnotes.
If you are creating a non-fiction book where these are absolutely necessary, you will have to go into your publisher's style guide and get down and dirty with your manuscript.
Or wait until later in 2012 when I get a chance to write a follow-up article that addresses these issues.
3.
Front and Back Matter Don't Matter When you design your front and back matter for your print version, it's easy to get all fancy and legal and add blank pages to fit the signature requirement.
Not so with digital.
The best thing for you to do is keep it simple.
You don't get to play with Word Art here.
Center your copy for the front matter and include:

My Book Title by Alex Author Smashwords (or Kindle) Edition, Copyright 2025 Alex Author This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.
If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.
If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.
com and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Your website link here.
Your profile page here.

This will, of course change a bit according to which publisher you use.
This example obviously comes from Smashwords, which we will get to next.
Suffice it to say that putting little logos and long, detailed copyright notices and columns of credits will only make you go back to banging your head against a table.
Again, we will tackle complex e-book formatting later next year.
Your end matter should include a mark that indicates your reader has reached the end of the book (e.
g.
, "###" or "The End"), plus a short, crafty little bio with a link to your webpage or other author profile.
4.
The Big Two Currently, the big two in digital publishing are Kindle Digital Publishing and Smashwords.
You have to go through Kindle to get your e-books on Amazon.
Well, so far anyway.
Smashwords will get you into virtually every other digital retailer through its.
epub format - the god of digital file formats for e-readers.
These two publishers should cover the majority of your bases in publishing.
5.
Meta-what? Finally, we get to the pice de resistance - metadata and search optimization.
If you ignore these two very critical items, no one will ever find you unless they already know your name.
When people search Amazon for a book they put in keywords like "mystery" or "cowboys" or "elves" into the search box.
You need to have metadata for your book description - genre, subgenre, sub-subgenre - as far down as you can get.
If you're a savvy marketer, you will know to analyze the bestseller lists and do some math on how to get on them.
Also, don't forget to get some reviews of your books and have people post them on the retailer sites and everywhere else you can find.
Unless you're a completely friendless orphan, you have friends and family who've read your book that will be delighted to give you a glowing review.
But don't stop there.
You and your people should also spend some time searching your name on the sites daily as your e-book is released.
Page hits count in rankings.
Link to your Amazon or Barnes and Noble listing on your website.
Organize a bestseller campaign to launch your book and encourage everyone to buy your book during one predetermined hour on launch day.
These tips are only the beginning of what you can and should do in digital publishing.
As 2012 rolls around, I will be writing several more articles targeting the dos, don'ts and how-tos of digital publishing and marketing.