What is your perspective about formatting a book (tedious, difficult)?

K. Lamb Another good question! I don't find either of them necessarily difficult, but definitely aggravating and tedious at times! I'll address both the traditional book and an ebook separately.

When you are formatting a traditional book you have to pay particular attention to white space and widow/orphan issues. White space occurs when justifying text. If it is too extensive, you actually need to rewrite passages to minimize this and make the page more aesthetically pleasing. You also need to watch the last line and first line of each page for widow and orphan lines. If you are adding full page illustrations, you need to make sure they coincide with the appropriate text as closely as possible.

Now if you are doing an ebook it is much simpler, except if you are adding in illustrations they can sometimes be a bit tricky. Once you have formatted an ebook you need to cross check on different readers to see how well they preview on each. (i.e. Kindle, iPad, smartphone, computer, etc.)

If you are the type of person that has a lot of patience, it really is a simple enough procedure. If you are easily frustrated, you may want to pay someone to do this process for you.

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