EBooks certainly seem to be the way forward for many new writers. You can now be your own publisher by creating a digital book; the publishing world has never looked so good. However, converting your book into a digital format can be a tricky one and it may seem that the actual writing of your book was the easy part. So here are a few tips to help you on your way if you decide to format by yourself.

Firstly, there are so many reading platforms and devices out there to choose from, including Apple iBook and Amazon Kindle. So where do you start?

Forget about the page in a book; this does not exist in the digital world and the same goes for headers, footers, and page numbers. They are not needed when formatting your book. So throw this rule book out of the window. All e-reader devices have different ways of operating and you can choose your own size of font, style of font, and whether you read in landscape mode or not. You need to learn a new way to format your book.

Keep formatting simple. This is the most basic rule. You do not need elaborate fonts cluttering up the display and, to be honest, most e-readers can only cope with certain styles of fonts. Keep the font simple and easy to read.

EBooks are less forgiving than their paper counterparts and all errors will be glaringly obvious. Some of the most common formatting errors include the use of spaces instead of Word's indent feature; not using page breaks to determine new chapters so that a chapter will begin at the bottom of a page rather than on a new page, and using multiple body text styles instead of using just one normal text - this makes the page appear messy and difficult to read.

If you really do begin to struggle in the formatting of your book or are not particularly ‘digitally minded,’ then it may be best to pay for a professional to do the formatting for you. You do not want all of your time and energy that was put into writing the book to go to waste.

It is also worth publishing your book in as many eBook formats as possible. Your book might be read on a home computer Kindle, or even on an iPhone. It is therefore important that you publish in multiple eBook formats so that this can be achieved. Popular formats include:

HTML – which is readable on web browsers

Plain text – which is readable on everything

PDF - which is excellent for picture books or anything with tables and graphs

epub - which is a very popular eBook format

mobi – which is used by the Kindle

If all of this sounds too confusing, then you can always approach an online digital publishing platform to help you with this process and help you to distribute your book. You just need to make sure that they can deliver to your chosen reading device and sales channels.