Reddit Reddit reviews A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress: Ebook Formatting and Cover Design Essentials

We found 25 Reddit comments about A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress: Ebook Formatting and Cover Design Essentials. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress: Ebook Formatting and Cover Design Essentials
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25 Reddit comments about A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress: Ebook Formatting and Cover Design Essentials:

u/Nuetrinostar · 13 pointsr/eroticauthors

There's a couple different routes you could go.

I've not used it myself, but Vellum is spoken of as the one of the nicest options. It's also quite pricey, but you could easily pay somebody to format it for you if you don't want to shell out the hundred or so bucks to have the program yourself.

Scrivener is another app that is spoken of highly. I've used neither of them personally, so take that with a grain of salt.

You could hand format it. Salacious Stories made a guide for erotica shorts, but I would imagine it would work for novels. It has the added advantage of Sal being a moderator on here who chooses to spend his free time being super goddamn helpful, and so if you have questions you can ask him directly.

The easiest route would be downloading it as a docx, ands chucking that into Kindle Create.

I'm not a formatting guru (though there are quite a few who hang out here), so I can only be of limited help, but that's the advice I'm capable of giving.

Congrats on getting your first novel done! Here's a celebratory tune I wrote just for you.

♪ Those smutbux will be coming round the mountain when they coooome ♪

♪ Those smutbux with be coming round the mountain when they coooome ♪

♪ Well enough with the chatter ♪

♪ Give me my happily ever after! ♪

♪ Those smutbux will be coming when they cooooooome ♪ ♪

u/SalaciousStories · 8 pointsr/eroticauthors

Even I never get the goddamn title right. :)

A Dirty Filthy Book Story in a Pretty Fancy Dress

u/chained-up · 6 pointsr/eroticauthors

Re: formatting — there’s a guide by SalaciousStories on the FAQ that’s only 2.99 or something. I’m not familiar with Udemy or Skillshare, but I really wouldn’t pay for a course on it. Good luck!!

ETA: so my guess is I can link this one?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WIPMMEC

u/LifeinParalysis · 6 pointsr/selfpublish

It's super easy to learn, honestly I would recommend anyone who self publishes to learn this part of the process because it is best to have fine control of it.

So learn up on some basic CSS, read this book but instead of doing all the stuff she says about formatting the text in word (search and replace), copy and paste your word document into this tool and let it do allll the work for you.

Otherwise, play with different CSS on your title pages (look at other authors for ideas), learn to embed custom fonts (fancy), and learn how to code a TOC from scratch (not hard! it's basic css).

I use Sigil personally because it gives me fine control of everything. You can use Calibre as she instructs, but Sigil is XHTML and will get pissed off if you screw anything up so it's a bit safer to me.

Why hand formatting instead of just grabbing Vellum and formatting for people? Vellum doesn't teach you shit, and you'll give people a better KENP by doing handformatting. You can do all that fancy Vellum shit with handformatting, and you can squeeze more pages out of it which is what everyone wants. How many more pages?

Some more schmuck uploaded this long ass story from a word document to Amazon and got 200 pages out of it. Using proper formatting, it went to 600+ pages. That is an uncommon example, but handformatting is nearly always better.

u/RattusRattus · 5 pointsr/selfpublish

I got a bundle with Write. Publish. Repeat., Let's get Digital, and How to Market an E-book. Good stuff. I think they have a podcast too, though I forget what it's called.

Did you use tabs to get the indents? I can pretty up the format, but honestly, taking out all the tabs is just too much work. There's this book you can check out too.

u/ides205 · 5 pointsr/eroticauthors

OK, I'll start things off. I had a pretty good week - sales picked up from the previous week, and my latest stories are doing pretty well.

The most important thing though is that yesterday I successfully hand-coded an ebook! Using the great guide "A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress" as well as Guido Henkel's guide, I was able to reformat an existing book, add in all the backmatter, convert it to an epub file, upload it to Amazon and test it out on my new Kindle - and it looks great! I strongly recommend both those guides to anyone who is thinking about starting hand coding. I was helped by the fact that I'm very computer savvy, but I think anyone could get the hang of it with some practice!

So this week the goal will be to reformat a bunch of my existing books, starting with the newest books and the top sellers. Extra smutbux, here I come!

u/write4lyfe · 5 pointsr/eroticauthors

Avoid using Word to create anything with HTML coding. In my experience, Word likes to add all kinds of kludgy bloat to the file to make it really damn obvious you coded it with Word. You want to use a far more barebones text editor like Notepad, Notepad++, or Jarte (there are others out there as well) if you're going to manually format. I wouldn't be surprised if something about how Word is handling the HTML coding is what's fucking up your font display.

Edit to add: For a good guide on formatting, you might consider checking out A Filthy Book In A Fancy Dress. There's a lot of step by step explanations in there on how to handle manually coding your books.

u/dr_rainbow · 5 pointsr/eroticauthors

I'm going to second Henkel's guide being out of date and broken. I used his guide to format my first novel and my KENP was atrocious. Salacious really took the time out of his day to help me fix it. Use his book instead, it's up to date!


Filthy Book in a fancy dress

u/kinkgirlwriter · 4 pointsr/eroticauthors

You can use Amazon's preview as you publish, but the best way to get a clean finished product, IMO, is converting everything to .mobi before you upload. You just get so many chances to look at it as the reader will see it.

I use a combo of what I've learned from Guido Henkel, u/SalaciousStories' A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress, and my own experiences and techniques, but the last step is always to open it up in Kindle Previewer and see exactly what the customer will see.

u/catladyfromhell · 3 pointsr/eroticauthors

I use /u/SalaciousStories' hand-formatting book, A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress. It's great! I highly recommend it.

There are a couple of things to be aware of. Calibre no longer automatically generates a mobi book when converting your zip documents to epub. You need to do this manually. If you don't want an extra TOC at the end of your book, make sure to check the "Do not add Table of Contents to book" option on the Mobi Output tab.

I have bad news about clicking an image in a mobi ebook. From what I can find, Mobi does not support that option. I tried everything I could to get it to work, then searched the net and discovered it isn't possible. You need to add a text link before or after the image with instructions to click there. It sucks, but that's the only way I could get it to work.

If anyone knows a solution to this problem, please share!

I don't know if you can use hosted images in an ebook. I wouldn't recommend it. What if something happens and the link doesn't work, or if the reader isn't connected to the net? I read most of my ebooks offline, so that would certainly be a problem for me.

I recommend embedding the image in the ebook itself. I use the "Save for Web" feature in Photoshop to reduce the size of my files if size is your worry. I don't know what software you're using, but check to see if it has a similar feature. I use <img src="image-name.jpg" alt=""/> to embed my images. Just make sure all images are included in the zip file you hand off to Calibre.

Hope this helps. Best of luck!

u/onomato-poetic · 3 pointsr/eroticauthors

I think the standard rec for hand formatting is sal's Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress...

There are also free ebook templates on the web, all you need to do is ask Google. But... if it gives you such a headache, why are you messing around with HTML in the first place?

Any particular reason why you don't want to upload your file as doc/docx?

Alternatively, there are plenty of free formatting options - like using Calibre, a plugin for Open Office (like Writer2Epub), an add-on for Sigil, or online services like Reedsy.

u/Smutstress · 3 pointsr/eroticauthors

A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress is a good place to start for hand formatting books.

u/mrsfizzleworth · 3 pointsr/eroticauthors

How about something like this:

If you're looking for more control over what your book will look like when published (i.e. page breaks before chapters, special chapter headings, etc.) you will want to look into hand-formatting. Here are a couple of books that go into further detail: Here and here!

u/romcomet · 3 pointsr/eroticauthors
u/daffodillime · 3 pointsr/eroticauthors

Yeah, I use Calibre for every one of my books.

Is it as flashy as Vellum or some other software for ebook formatting? By no means. But it's free and it will get the job done. And, frankly, learning how to use it is probably time well-spent, even if you end up moving on to different software in the future. /u/SalaciousStories has a book called Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress that taught me the basics of how to use Calibre and I highly recommend it.

u/SklavosChara · 2 pointsr/eroticauthors

> Anyone have tips for formatting?

Oh boy do I! Honestly, for the first few months of shorts, I just did things on Google docs then uploaded a docx file to Amazon. That worked fine and looked okay and let me focus on what was important: writing more shorts.

If you want to get fancy there's a bunch of way to go: you can use Scrivener, apparently, as you're doing. If you have a Mac and want them to look really pretty you can get a program called Vellum (there are ways to get it on your PC, too, by simulating a Mac, if you really want Vellum). The two programs I've heard mentioned for Windows (or Mac) are Jutoh and Sigil.

Finally, if you want to invest a fair amount of time learning stuff, don't get frustrated very easily, and want complete control over your books, you can do something called hand formatting. That's where you go in and use HTML to make your manuscript look nice. I just learned how to do this and find it quiet satisfying. Check out A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress by Cooper Kegel and Zen of eBook Formatting by Guido Henkel. Henkel also has a series of blog posts if you want a quick overview of what you're getting into. Both of the books are free to read with Kindle Unlimited though, I believe, and you can get a free month of KU if you're not already signed up. It's quite useful for doing market research anyway.

But, anyway, if your just getting started I'd say: just make it look nice in a Word doc and upload that.

P.S. I don't really know what I'm talking about. Just repeating what I've learned so far.

u/SuperSecretSmut · 2 pointsr/eroticauthors

Vellum is insanely easy to just jump into using. Yes, it's got a stiff price tag, but I think it's just one of those "the cost of doing business" things. Plus it's obviously a professional write-off (so is a laptop or whatever you write on). The books come out looking beautiful, and all the research I've done has Vellum at the top for best KENP count.

That said, hand formatting allegedly can get you a little more if done correctly. I don't at all have the time to get into learning it, but if I did, I'd probbly go with /u/salaciousstories 's book on how to do it. I know people who've read it and rave about his guide.

But yeah, Vellum if you just want to click and go. It's so damn easy, the books look incredibly professional, and your KENP is basically the best you can get.

u/FapBrigade · 2 pointsr/eroticauthors

Is it this one?

Super helpful guide.

u/jill_tremendous · 2 pointsr/eroticauthors

Two books that I've seen recommended here and found really helpful, though they're more about the meta and marketing side of self-publishing:

A Filthy Book In a Fancy Dress, will help you format your ebooks and make them more appealing:
https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC

And Naughty Ink, which deals with marketing your books, including sections on everything from keywords to bundles, specific advice for each of the big self-publishing websites, etc:
https://www.amazon.com/Naughty-Ink-Erotica-Publish-Successful-ebook/dp/B00L8ERJVU

u/Cocoanuttie · 2 pointsr/eroticauthors

Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress (I was just about to edit my comment to recommend it, too)

u/notawerebear · 2 pointsr/eroticauthors

I write in VIM hand-formatting as I go. Before I start a story I run a custom bash, script story.sh, that builds a cast, outline, blurb and story file. The story file populates with a pre-formatted table of contents and chapters in html.

After I'm finished I run another script that builds epub's, mobi's, pdf's for all platforms as well as shrinking my cover file into various size jpg's for all platforms. It populates front and backmatter based on pen name (stored in seperate folders), with unique backmatter for each storefront.

The same script uses pandoc to convert to doc, docx for nook and d2d. Still tweaking to get clean documents that can be uploaded directly to nookpress.

Not an ex-coder, just a hobbyist but if you're interested I'd be happy to send it over. It's taken the P out of PITA when it comes to actually publishing and once I have a book ready it takes about half an hour to publish it.

epubs throw no errors on kobo or google play. That took a looooong time to figure out.

I love the dark comfort of the command line and love vim. I know there's a VIM vs. EMACS flameware that's been raging for centuries but have not had time to delve into it. Care to elucidate the difference?

Also, props to /u/SalaciousStories book Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress . That really helped me get my css act together.

u/popularfakename · 1 pointr/eroticauthors

Just read this book and you will be illuminated.

edit: I did not write this book, but I am a shameless shill for our very own /u/salaciousstories.

https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=filthy+book+in+a+fancy+dress&qid=1572358008&sr=8-1

u/eroticlurker · 1 pointr/eroticauthors

For me coding is less hard than forcing myself to do a boring thing lots of times! The process goes like this:

1.) Google something like what I want to do. (Hope someone already did something similar.)

2.) Copy it. Make the changes to apply to my particular situation.

3.) It does something. Not what I wanted it to do. Cry. Swear.

4.) Google something slightly different and splice in the new information.

5.) Does it work? If so, yay! If not, go to 3. Repeat until forever.

Here's the little bit I stared at for 30 minutes until I figured out what I was doing wrong (and therefore what was right):

line = re.sub(r'<p>','<p class=first>',line)
line = line.replace('</span>','')
splitstring = line.partition('<span>')
line = splitstring[0] + '<span class=fletter>' + splitstring[2][0] + '</span>' + splitstring[2][1:]

which basically takes a line of the document which is encased in <p><span>[words]</span></p> tags and moves the span with my first letter class around the first letter.

It is simple and silly and dumb and I yelled at it and I sent my partner angry unicorn .gifs about it and when it worked at last I got up out of my chair and did a small dance in the middle of the room.

Hat tip to "Zen of Ebook Formatting" and "A Filthy Book in a Fancy Dress", the latter of which I can never ever search for ("A Naughty Book in a Pretty Dress"? "A Dirty Book in a Classy Dress"? "A Slutty Book in a Lovely Dress"?) and end up searching for BOOK DRESS FORMATTING DAMMIT until I find it.

https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC

https://www.amazon.com/Zen-eBook-Formatting-Step-step-ebook/dp/B00KJAH4HS/

EDIT: to add a closed paren. you might think I would be on the lookout for that stuff after coding all day but APPARENTLY NOT

u/YesterdayIBuiltToday · 1 pointr/eroticauthors

> A Filthy Book In a Fancy Dress, will help you format your ebooks and make them more appealing: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Book-Fancy-Dress-Formatting-ebook/dp/B00WIPMMEC

I'm planning on buying Vellum before my next book, and I'm hoping that will take care of formatting for me. Maybe wistful thinking...

> https://www.amazon.com/Naughty-Ink-Erotica-Publish-Successful-ebook/dp/B00L8ERJVU

I'll read through this. I'm only in Amazon, so some of the information might not be relevant, but I always find a few gems of info. Great that it's in KU!

Thanks for the links.