Format Wars: Word vs Pages

While prepping a short book, I spent some time formatting in both Microsoft’s Word and Apple’s Pages software.

Indie authors today wear many hats. In order to sell ebooks through the many popular distributors such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore, Kobo and Smashwords, authors must provide their books in a file format that retailer can accept.

Of course, they each want something a little different.

While prepping a short book (non-fiction, with lots of headings and hotlinks), I spent some time (too many hours, actually) formatting in both Microsoft’s Word and Apple’s Pages software.

The quick discovery:

For Mac owners, Apple offers a Style Template for Pages, which gives you the chapter heading, title, author and Table of Contents formatting. You can edit these to look however you want. Copy this template and paste in your own text, and you can have a book that exports to ePub format. This ePub reads well on Apple and Kobo devices.

However, this ePub file did not translate well when testing with Adobe Digital Editions.  The Table of Contents (TOC) disappeared completely and other formatting got lost.

I had a different issue with Amazon. They don’t allow ePub files to be uploaded. They do allow for HTML, but Pages doesn’t export to that format. Pages does allow you to export to Word format, so I did that. But, wouldn’t you know it, all my preset styles and TOC were lost in that conversion. Yes, I had to reformat the book again using Word styles and custom build a TOC.

Bottom line: Pages software is a handy tool for creating an upload-ready file for Apple and Kobo. Word, properly formatted using a stylesheet, will create a proper HTML or .doc file for uploading to Amazon & PubIt.

There are a number of conversion softwares available, to create the various formats necessary for uploading to the retail site. In every case, you want to start with a document created using a style sheet. Each retailer offers guides on formatting.

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