When it comees to ebook design, using e-book templates can save you hours, even days, of valuable time, help you sell more e-books and substantially increase the satisfcation of your readers leading to more word-of-mouth marketing, better testimonials and much lower return or disatisfaction rates.
It’s true, the information contained in your e-book is the most important part, without it a great e-book design will not carry the day.
However, using proven e-book templates to improve your layout and design will certainly enhance the percieved value of your e-book – just today I saw a few postings on a major marketing forum praising the quality and design of a recently released e-book, some nice free publicity.
After doing so many of these for my own infoproducts, I now have made several templates available to members of InfoProduct Marketing Zone, but here are the basics.
First, The cover can be a graphic loaded into Word or Adobe – typically you get an e-book cover designed for your website, another flat design to be added to Amazon listing (if you choose to list with Amazon) and yet another large version for the cover. Tpical e-book graphics designers will give you all of these for the same price if you ask. If you are searching for a professional, quality e-book cover designer – visit Vaughn over at KillerCovers.
Second, as has previously been mentioned, learn how to use MS Word Styles – you can set the style of each heading as you go -but it quickly becomes a mess and doesn’t scale throughout your document.
Third, learn to use “Headers and Footers” – that’s the consistent title, page numbers, and line that appears at the top and bottom of each page.
Fourth – learn to use Index and Tables under the “Insert” menu item in Word – this gives you many pre-defined fomatting for tables of contents and figure indexes – these automatically update and match pages to your table of contents AND make your e-books look more professional.
There are other enhancements you can use as well including text boxes (borders, shading, fill colors, etc…) that allow you to highlight text, quotes etc…
Then, there is always the ability to use pre-defined templates – you can get them done on elance or rentacoder, we have a set we provide in the membership site (along with a set of videos describing how to customize them), lots of options.
Nice part of using templates is that all of the styles have already been set – if you like the look, this saves lots of time.
Jeff
