Luckily, with the eBook platforms (like kindle or Barnes&Noble) and a good ebook template, anyone can publish a book nowadays and there are no excuses for not fulfilling your dreams of becoming a writer, especially when we are talking about “how to” books (not novels) that provide information about a simple subject.

The problem with these books usually arise when, once written, we try to adapt our precious book that we just wrote using Microsoft Word, to an eBook format resulting in most cases in a book that is very hard to read.

Clearly, in the novel style books, in which the text has exactly the same format all the time, it is not worth it to dedicate time designing the layout as an automatic converter is more than enough. Besides, we must consider that in any case we will not achieve the same results as in Word, as the available options for the eBook template design are fewer.

But if the book is about some practical subject, it will be necessary then to include images, tips, warnings or any other series of styles that allow us reading the book more comfortably. We do not believe that the same results can be achieved with an automatic converter, so here is where the creative part of the design plays its role.

Luckily, we have Sigil, a simple and intuitive text editor that will allow us to format our book as we wish. You can find it here and it is amazing how easy it is to learn how to use it and design the layout for our book. We believe that once you’ve designed the layout for your first book, you can design the format of a book with similar features in a couple of hours.

In fact, the most complicated part of a good layout design with this editor is to create the ebook template with a style sheet (CSS) that is adequate to the format of the book we want to make and then just apply them to the text.

For example, if we have a simple recipe book designed using Word we will need something similar in the eBook so that it’s readable. In this particular case we have different image sizes (ingredients, pictures of each step), and two different fonts for the letters (apart from the titles, which will use a separate font).

The appropriate combination of styles will allow the readers to feel comfortable with the lecture or to abandon it right away.

To achieve a similar result on the eBook, we’ve created a Style Sheet template using Sigil that can be downloaded here and we have applied each one of the styles accordingly.

TYPE	CSS	RESULT
Ingredients	img.small { height: 75px; text-align: center; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; display: inline-block; }
Main images	img.medium { height: 250px; text-align: center; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; display: inline-block; }
Suggestions	p.detail { border-style: dotted none; border-top-color: rgb(99, 36, 35); border-top-width: 1pt; border-bottom-color: rgb(99, 36, 35); border-bottom-width: 1pt; margin-left: 40pt; margin-right: 40pt; font-style: italic; font-size: 75%; color: #000099; }
Ingredients Text	p.Time { text-align: center; font-style: italic; font-size: 95%; }

Using this template, the layover result will be attractive enough to be comfortable to read, without having only a bunch of letters and paragraphs one on top of the other.

We hope this has been useful. Once you have a CSS template ready for the kind of book in which you want to design the layover, it will be extremely easy and quick to do.

Badra Moncath+