Formatting Your E-Book

The compile options in the following sections are specific to the ePub and Kindle output types.

Adding a cover

Despite advice to the contrary, books are always judged by their covers. Luckily, Scrivener makes it easy to insert cover art for your e-book. The design is up to you.

The cover image is displayed at the beginning of the book, before the table of contents or any other front matter, and as a thumbnail on the virtual bookshelf on most e-readers.

The image you plan to use must be imported into the Scrivener project before you can add it as a cover (see Chapter 2 for more on importing).

Keep in mind a couple of things when choosing or creating cover images:

Image Type: The image should be an RGB-based raster format (for example, PNG, TIFF, or JPEG), not a vector format (such as EPS). Also, don’t use the CMYK color model, which is better for high-quality printing.

Image Size: 800 pixels tall by 600 pixels wide at 72 DPI is ideal for a clean display without unnecessarily inflating the e-book size. Large files can cause memory problems for e-reader devices and make the file difficult to send via e-mail.

To add a cover to your e-book, click the Cover tab and click the Cover Image drop-down list to view all images located in your Binder. You must import the desired image to the Binder if you want it to appear in the list.

The following options appear only for ePub output:

For Reading in iBooks Only: Select this option if you’re compiling for use in iBooks (but not delivering via iTunes Producer). This option adds additional information that iTunes needs to create the thumbnail for the bookshelf.

This is a good option for proofreading your work on the iPad, but if you’re submitting your work to iTunes Producer, leave it unchecked so that Producer can create its own thumbnail information.

Cover Page Title: Enter the title of the cover page as you want it to appear in the table of contents (not the title of your book). The default is Cover.

SVG (Advanced): Click this button to insert SVG code that can be used with or rather than a bitmap image. Be sure to maintain the correct aspect ratio to avoid a distorted image. SVG isn’t compatible with iBooks. If you don’t know what SVG code is, you can safely ignore this option.

Adding document properties for e-books

Document properties added for e-books populate the description fields used by most e-readers. Some readers take only Title and Author, but many desktop readers and services (such as Adobe Digital Editions and Calibre) use all the data you provide.

Add the properties by clicking the Meta-Data tab and then entering the desired data into the appropriate text boxes. Keep in mind these tips:

Authors: Enter the author name(s). The EPUB format supports multiple authors and individual author searches on books with more than one author. If the book has more than one author, separate them by a semicolon so that each is registered separately.

The Kindle exporter exports only the first author name if you separate the names with semicolons. To include all author names, insert a space or comma between each name, rather than a semicolon.

Language Code: Be sure to use the correct ISO standard two-letter language code. For English, it’s en. (Windows users, select the correct language from the drop-down list.)

Find the list of language codes at www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php .

Custom Identifier: If you have a custom identifier from your publisher (for example, an ISBN), select Use Custom Unique Identifier and enter it in the text box. Otherwise, Scrivener creates a unique identifier — required for published e-books — when you compile.

Increasing the navigation dots on the Kindle progress bar

The Kindle uses the top levels of the table of contents to create the navigation dots in the progress bar. To create more navigation dots (one for each item in the Binder), you must flatten the list so that every item is considered a top-level file.

To create a flat (nonhierarchical) list of the Binder items, click the Layout tab, and then select Use Flat List of Contents in Navigation Controls (NCX).