Formatting for Online Reading

[Sextified]

I know that I am opening myself up to a lot of slings and arrows, but I have a real problem that I am trying to sort out.

I would like some advice from Authors who have published their books for online sales. I'd also like to hear from Readers who spend a lot of time reading those e-books, too.

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If you reach all the way back to the pulp writers of the early 30's and later, there was a very successful and regimented format to write in.

Potential authors learned in that style, and their main goal was to get published in the cheap and very small books that flourished back then. Tiny primordial ancestors of today's mainstream paper monsters. Detective fiction, adventure stories, ghost stories, war stories. They all flourished on the tiny little leafs that they got crammed onto.

Authors HAD to write to a specific paragraph length, and handle dialogue a certain way, or they just didn't get snapped up by the publishers. You either conformed, or were out. Period.

Be as wordy as you like, because you got paid for each and every one, but fit to what the typesetter's demanded or else!

These days, especially with free sites like Lit and others, the Readers custom format how they want YOUR words to appear on THIER screens. Or online publishers do the hard work, and spend a lot of time editing and formatting their purchased material, to fit on various screen sizes and devices.

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The truth about my new novel is that I don't KNOW where to plan that it will end up!

Back in MY 'old days' writers stuck to the set style used everywhere, and they got published in hardbacks and paperbacks. The material was WRITTEN for the rules of the destination. No long rants. No short one line paragraphs. Dialogue scrunched together to reduce the hard page count. Very little 'open' space for the readers to rest their eyes.

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On my mainstream Sword and Sorcery novel, I am writing IN a paperback template created in InDesign. I can SEE when I have issues with run on paragraphs, or too choppy dialogue hand offs. That is all well and good.

I used the first book of my favorite modern Fantasy trilogy to copy the dimensions, gutters, headers, footers, page numbers, and chapter break specifications. It is going along just fine!

The Erotic Novel?

Not so much.

As an experiment, I recently took the simple and printable (8.5"x11" with .5" margins) Erotic text and flowed it into a copy of my Sword & Sorcery novel template. When I made a PDF to send it out to a pre-reader, I got a horrible shock!

It 'mostly' flows very well, but there are some sections of long descriptive narrative that look like the old "tombstone" effect in newspaper galley type. Other places, the long sections of dialogue overwhelms the page, making it hard to see the identifiers, that keep the person speaking firmly in the reader's minds. The 'breathless' sex scenes that before 'raced' down the page, now just LOOK horribly sketchy and broken up.

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So if you just don't see how this could be a problem? Take a typical paperback book's text, and flow it directly BACK into a format specifically meant for an iPad!

Then see what you get!

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So for those of you that Write for eBooks, or those of you that read them all the time? - - -

• What is the 'general' width and height of the screen on the most heavily used devices?

• How do you tailor your writing (if you even do), to be read on something as small as an old iPhone, to tablets and iPads, to laptops and full size computer screens?

• Do you write in a template that keeps you 'visually' on track, or is your normal style so rigid that it just isn't a problem for you?

• Or do you just write what you want, and let the people who are going to publish it, hack all of your hard your work to pieces to make it fit?

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InDesign suggested a 2732 x 2048 pixel size for an iPad Pro. For traditional 'Web Pages' they suggest a 1920 x 1080 pixel page.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Especially since I 'like' how my erotic story reads as it is, (letter size page) but I am now convinced that I need to change the Erotic novel's style to be more "Reader" and "Sales" friendly.

 

[TadOverdon]

I write in a Smashwords WORD template. It hasn't changed my writing style,for better or worse.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Seeing as how I grew up reading the pulp fiction novels, I suppose some of that might show through, yet I think I have my own style.

As for what device to write for? Well, like here at Lit, there are what are called style guides and if you vary to much from them they will not pass muster.

I too publish on Smashwords. I use the same format that I do here. Paragraphs separated by a double return no indent. As for device, I have read stuff on my little seven inch phone, on a 10" tablet, a 15" laptop, and a 25" monitor. Everything here at Lit will follow the CSS. eBooks from any other venue will be in some format that you need a reader for, such as epub. That will control what and how you see the text, except they will allow you to change the text face and size to your liking along with whether you see white on black or black on white.

Use of bold, italics, centering, etc. it still up to you.

Most publications are and should be simple and easy to read. I have seen some authors who think they are still back in eighth grade and try all kinds of fancy formatting making what they wrote hard to read.

If you remember old paperbacks, then you will have seen, just a plain typeface. They did have the indents to start a new paragraph, but that was to save not having a wasted white space and so they could fit more lines per page.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I read a lot online, especially on phones.
Paragraphs need to be short compared to print books, but other than that I don't think there's issues.
I'm about to try putting some stuff on Smashwords so I guess I'll find out how it looks. (I've read the FAQs but hints and tips appreciated!)

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I read a lot online, especially on phones.
Paragraphs need to be short compared to print books, but other than that I don't think there's issues.
I'm about to try putting some stuff on Smashwords so I guess I'll find out how it looks. (I've read the FAQs but hints and tips appreciated!)

Tip: use the same text you use here. If you use Word, submit the document minus any html you have inserted. Bold and Italic the places you use the html tags. I always do to the word text what the html tag would do, so then I only have to remove the tags.

They do have a Style Guide that you can download, read it, it's got some good information in it.

Hope that helps?

 

[Sextified]

I want to thank everyone for their thoughts here and off-line. They are very helpful!

After posing some of the same questions to my pre-readers, I am a little less panicked. Mainly because I realized that I already AM correctly writing in two completely different styles for two different destinations.

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The Sword & Sorcery book is just fine. I WANT it to FEEL old school, and the paperback template I created to help me do that is more than doing its job. I love the old school writers like Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, Ursula K. Leguin, L. Sprague De Camp, Michael Moorcock and so many others.

The narrow confines of that file help me visualize that very easily.

I checked a little more closely, my style of writing for THAT project WILL be just fine for an eBook, and I'll worry about any small modifications for that later. "Scaling up" and going in that direction for a conversion works.

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For the Erotic novel?

It is unlikely that it would EVER be put into hard copy, nor should I even be worrying about that.

There was no reason to panic when I got that surprise, and I have settled down. And in a little while I WILL start doing some research into to established templates to see if I am TENDING to doing anything that would be distracting visually.

I just had to stop and realize that I've spent over a decade writing to the 'standard screen' specifications of another website. It was appropriate and successful. It became an unconscious thing, and I naturally considered the right paragraph lengths, breaks and dialogue tags for THAT location.

You can't spend all that time writing 1.6 million words and not have it effect you.

The new novel's text already IS pretty close to what eBooks will require.

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"Style-wise" I am not too radically different in anything that I do, and even the mechanics of the 'breathless' sex scenes, and the broken up 'inner thoughts' of a character in distress looks fine in eBook formats. I just need to practice toning it down a little, and cut the lengths of each "outburst".

After I experiment with some templates, perhaps Smashwords, I'll think about changing my Erotic novel's InDesign specs to one of those dimensions.

It turns out I only have one pre-reader for the erotic novel who does most of their reading on their phone, and I'll work with them to make their task easier.

Thanks so much!

 

[ElectricBlue]

"Style-wise" I am not too radically different in anything that I do, and even the mechanics of the 'breathless' sex scenes, and the broken up 'inner thoughts' of a character in distress looks fine in eBook formats. I just need to practice toning it down a little, and cut the lengths of each "outburst".

Your long post seems about right for "white space" writing that's easy on the eye. With a mix of dialogue and longer narrative paragraphs, you generally get a good balance, I find, but avoid blocks of text. If in doubt, and there's a new thought, I'll usually drop in a paragraph break rather than merge two shorter paras into one.

Although, just the other day...

 

[Bramblethorn]

Tip: use the same text you use here. If you use Word, submit the document minus any html you have inserted. Bold and Italic the places you use the html tags. I always do to the word text what the html tag would do, so then I only have to remove the tags.

They do have a Style Guide that you can download, read it, it's got some good information in it.

Hope that helps?

Seconded, the SW style guide is pretty helpful if you work through it.

If you're planning to cross-post, another option is to go in the other direction: write a master version in Word with italics and/or bold, then use the advanced search-and-replace or that website somebody posted to automatically add the HTML for the Literotica version.

I've never tried changing the paragraph length between Literotica and Smashwords. Ebooks give the user a lot of control over how the story displays, so trying to fine-tune that from my side feels redundant.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Seconded, the SW style guide is pretty helpful if you work through it.

If you're planning to cross-post, another option is to go in the other direction: write a master version in Word with italics and/or bold, then use the advanced search-and-replace or that website somebody posted to automatically add the HTML for the Literotica version.

I've never tried changing the paragraph length between Literotica and Smashwords. Ebooks give the user a lot of control over how the story displays, so trying to fine-tune that from my side feels redundant.

Haven't done this either, although I do try to keep my paragraphs short as I myself hate walls of text.

 

[Jmanchu]

Yoo I'm all about that sword and sorcery shit, and classic fiction, pulp fiction, you name it.I love the classic of Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. You wrote sword and sorcery? Where it gonna be at? I wanna read me some

I don't know much about formatting stories online since for me, it's just been experimentation, including how to separate scenes and chapters which I do lately with that "<<<<>>>>" since it looks clean.

Speaking of sword and sorcery and high fantasy... I should really get back to working on mine(Got the fourth episode of my series here about ready, just have to finish a scene that's giving me trouble).

 

[Jmanchu]

Seconded, the SW style guide is pretty helpful if you work through it.

If you're planning to cross-post, another option is to go in the other direction: write a master version in Word with italics and/or bold, then use the advanced search-and-replace or that website somebody posted to automatically add the HTML for the Literotica version.

I've never tried changing the paragraph length between Literotica and Smashwords. Ebooks give the user a lot of control over how the story displays, so trying to fine-tune that from my side feels redundant.

That's a thing? You can automatically add the HTML without having to do it yourself!? Yoo, I need that shit. Where can I find that?

 

[Bramblethorn]

That's a thing? You can automatically add the HTML without having to do it yourself!? Yoo, I need that shit. Where can I find that?

The one I have bookmarked is https://www.textfixer.com/ but I think somebody here had a conversion site too.