The self-publishing journey isn't always easy or cheap. Some things—like editing and cover design—should be left to paid professionals, but you can save money and achieve great results formatting your own e-book.

DIY e-book formatting may seem daunting, but new tools—paid and free—make it fairly easy for most fiction manuscripts. These tools are discussed early in this guide so you will have a short read if one of them works for you.

If your manuscript is more complicated (e.g., a nonfiction book with tables, list items, images, footnotes, and other specially formatted elements), this guide will explain everything you need to produce a professional and pleasing e-book. Advanced formatting is accomplished with HTML and CSS, but you won't need any prior experience or knowledge of either of these as the guide includes a tutorial to teach you everything you need to know.

The end result of using this book will be a well-formatted EPUB e-book that can be submitted to Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Nook, and any other e-book publishing platform (NOTE: if you are looking at other guides that mention needing a MOBI file for Amazon, you are looking at an outdated guide as that is no longer best practice).

Here are some specific things that you will get from reading this book.