A few posts back, I mentioned I was going to write about how to make your book look beautiful on a Kindle. I'm afraid I'm going to have to renege on that promise - I've decided it isn't possible.
Let's say you publish a PDF, as I was initially going to. You've chosen your fonts, positioned the text exactly as you want it, and put some images in. The pages fit the size of your Kindle's screen exactly. You've checked over it, and you feel happy for the rest of the world to see it.
The first person to download your book is Dave. Dave has an iPad, so the pages of your book don't fit his screen, and PDF does not allow for the text to re-flow. Dave decides he'd rather the book were an .epub file, so he uses Calibre to convert it.
Unfortunately, this leaves your carefully formatted sequence of poems completely unreadable.
My point is that as soon as your book is available on the internet, you have to relinquish control. Even rotating the screen on a device changes the way your book appears.
Self-publish eBook store Smashwords have a program that takes your document and converts it into every format imaginable. They call it a meat grinder, which I think is a nice metaphor for the effect the internet will have on your carefully presented words. Now, to really torture that metaphor; if you had a meat grinder and wanted to make some good mince, you'd be careful to only put quality meat and no bones in at the start. This is what your eBook ought to consist of - lots of meaty language and as little formatting as possible.
Whatever your feeling about losing all the 'packaging' a text usually comes wrapped up in, it's probably best to embrace purity. At least it places the focus back where it should be: on your writing.
If you'd like to learn more about stripping back a word document for ePublishing, I strongly recommend you read the Smashwords Style Guide, even if you don't plan on publishing with them. Having a clean word document is a good first step in preparing your work, however you eventually plan to sell it.
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