Style Suggestions

At Draft2Digital, our goal is to support your style guide. As long as you've been consistent in your formatting throughout the manuscript (especially when it comes to chapter titles), we expect our conversion software to handle it perfectly. That doesn't mean our conversion software will handle it perfectly. We're constantly trying to improve the process, so if you attempt to publish something and it doesn't come out looking perfect, please use our Contact Form and let us know. We'll examine your source document and our output, and look for ways to improve the style recognition. Of course, that takes time. If our conversion process doesn't work automatically and you want to get a beautifully-formatted eBook right away, here are a few things you can do to get the best results:

Title Page, Copyright Page, and Other Endmatter

Unless you have one you really like, don't prepare endmatter like title page, copyright page, or "other books by this author." Just give us the story, and let us do the technical parts. After you've uploaded your book, the Layout process will allow you to embed several auto-generated endmatter pages using the information stored in our database. Of course, if you have your own custom endmatter, you can include it in the document and we'll do our best to recognize it and format it properly.

Chapter Titles

Mark your chapter breaks with something distinctive, and be consistent. For best results, make it bold and of a larger font than the rest of the document. So if your body text is Times New Roman 12pt, make your chapter titles Times New Roman 14 pt (or larger), and make them bold. As long as they're consistent that way, we should recognize them as chapter titles. That will let us make a perfect Table of Contents for you, and that really improves the reading experience.

Blockquotes and Poetry

We detect blockquotes based on the margin (the distance from the right and left side of the page). You don't need to use any particular margin, but to include a blockquote in your text, just make that block narrower than the main body text. We can also sometimes recognize poetry formatting, as long as you place it within a blockquote. If you have a poem or song in your body text, make sure it's tabbed in further than the body text, and there's a chance we'll catch it.