Episode 296: Eight Ebook Formatting Errors Readers Hate And How To Fix Them

In this week's episode, we take a look at eight common ebook formatting errors and how to correct them.

This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Ghost Exile: Omnibus One at my Payhip store:

EXILE25

The coupon code is valid through April 6, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 296 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 27th, 2026 and today we are looking at eight ebook formatting problems that readers hate and how to fix them. Before we get into our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.

So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Ghost Exile: Omnibus One at my Payhip store. That coupon code is EXILE25. And as always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through April 6th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook as we leave winter and head into spring, we have got you covered.

Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am currently 97,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, and I'm hoping to get to the 100,000 word mark by the end of today. You will note that if you read the first three books in the series, this will make it longer than the first three by good bit, which is part of the reason why it's taking so long. I was hoping to have it published by now, to be honest, but between the length and the variety of things I've had to do in real life before I can get to writing have slowed me down a bit. I have made progress and I am hoping to finish the rough draft before the 31st, if all goes well. Then it will be time to write a tie-in short story that newsletter subscribers will get for free when Blade of Wraiths is published, and then on to editing. So I'm hoping to have the book out in the second half of April, if all goes well and the creek doesn't rise, so to speak.

I'm also 12,000 words into Dragon Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. I'm hoping that will be out in May because that will become the main project once Blade of Wraiths is finished.

In audiobook news, as I mentioned before, recording of Blade of Storms (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is complete. I think as of right now, you can get it at my Payhip store, Google Play, and Kobo. Audible, Amazon, Apple, and a few of the other major stores should hopefully be coming along before too much longer.

Recording is done on Wizard Assassin, which you may recall is the fifth book in the Rivah series, and that is narrated by Leanne Woodward. We just have to proof that, and then it'll be time to submit it for processing at the stores. So hopefully you'll be able to get your hands on that before too much longer.

I believe next week, Hollis McCarthy will start recording on Cloak of Illusion, the 12th book in the Cloak Mage series. Since a few people have asked about this, I thought I'd mentioned here there will be a Cloak Mage: Omnibus Four in audio that will combine Cloak of Embers, Cloak of Titans, and Cloak of Illusion. I will probably start working on that one month after Cloak of Illusion comes out in audio. So that will probably be along sometime this summer, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. We've got good things coming up for you soon.

00:03:18 Main Topic: ebook Formatting That Readers Hate

Now let's move on to our main topic this week, and it's something I have quite a bit of experience with, I have to say, is ebook formatting that readers hate. Today, we're going to talk about issues with ebook formatting, a topic that people have very strong opinions about. I am going to talk about eight issues in particular and then discuss how we can fix or prevent or best of all, avoid them.

First of all, what do we mean by ebook formatting? Formatting is the term to describe the layout, text, and images of the book. Back in the print book days, this was a complicated but fairly fixed thing. In the very old days, you would have to lay it out the books manually. A few decades ago, they had programs like QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign where you could use these software applications to prepare finished files for sending to the printer to be printed as books. But nowadays, in an age where books are electronic files read on dozens of possible devices and apps, it's much more difficult to predict every possible thing that can go wrong with formatting.

For example, with a print book in the old days, you would set the layout, and that is the way the layout would look. Every single book (ideally) printed would look the same. But in the modern age, if you have an ebook, it could be read on a Kindle, a Kindle Color, the Kindle app on the phone, a Barnes and Noble Nook, a Google tablet, on Apple iBooks on an iPod, on Apple iBooks on an iPhone, on the Kindle app on an iPhone. There are literally dozens of different potential combinations where an ebook file could be read and therefore dozens of different potential complications that can arise for ebook formatting. If there are formatting problems, readers will not be able to understand or even physically be able to read the text at worst, and more likely will be deeply annoyed by the issues that feel like road bumps such as extra line breaks and will express their displeasure in reviews.

There are also an abundance of ebooks out there that are hastily converted from PDF or Word docs that make for an extremely difficult reading experience. Many of the problems we're going to talk about today arise from when that happens, including the first several. So with that in mind, here are eight ebook formatting errors to avoid and how to deal with them.

#1: Illustrations, charts, and maps. Some of the most common issues are that these aren't legible in grayscale (like an e-ink reader, like the Kindle or the various Kobo devices) or have too small fonts or a poor quality or low resolution. This is a very common problem, and it's kind of a problem across all ebooks. Like for example, think of the map of Middle Earth from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It's a very complicated map with a lot of different names on it.

Now imagine trying to read that map on a six inch black and white Kindle screen. You probably aren't going to be able to do it very well. People using dark mode are most likely going to have problems with seeing images in the same way. So if you have an image heavy book, it's a good idea to test that.

So how to fix this? What I've done myself, because I write a lot of fantasy novels and fantasy novels traditionally need maps, is I will put the full color maps on my website and then in the author's note at the beginning, say a map of Owyllain or a map of Andomhaim is available at the author's website on this link. I had a few people ask if I could put the maps in the books and the nearest thing I've done is including the maps with some of the direct sales of my Payhip store.

I think the system works very well because those map pages are consistently some of the most visited pages on my website. And to be honest, it would be a lot easier to look at the map on, for example, your tablet or your computer instead of on your phone when you're trying to use the e-reader application. And even if you are looking at the map on my website on your phone, you can pinch zoom in the browser in the way you probably can't in the ebook reader. So that is the quick and easy solution for it. For more image intensive books like textbooks, for example, you just have to take great care and make sure they use large, high resolution images that aren't going to get pixelated. It may be a good idea to set up a website that has these images that the readers can refer to. This would be a bit of extra expense and work, obviously, but it would go a long way to making your readers happy, like I have done with the maps on my website.

#2: Paragraphs that aren't indented or unneeded spaces between indented paragraphs. This is one of the biggest pet peeves that people have when reading ebooks. Indented paragraphs are important and if they're properly indented, then space isn't needed between the paragraphs and this will look odd to readers. This was in fact a problem I did have the first couple of years of my ebook publishing career because I used Sigil for my primary ebook formatting and that is the default way Sigil renders ebooks. In time, I started to switch to using Vellum for ebook formatting and that solved the problem. So what I did at that point was I just went through all my entire library, reformatted the ebooks in Vellum, and then re-uploaded them to the various ebook store platforms and that took care of the problem. And that's what I've been doing ever since. I've been using Vellum for ebook formatting since at least 2018 at this point, I think.

So how to fix? The easiest way to fix this is to spend a little money on a tool like a Vellum or Atticus or a similar program that does ebook formatting for you because that will make sure your paragraphs are indented properly and then you can spot check as well to make sure that the table of contents is working and the chapters are working and that the paragraphs are being indented properly.

#3: Our third issue is hard to read fonts. Some people enjoy fonts that are very stylized, but let's be honest, most readers don't. It's also an accessibility issue if the serifs or the flourishes are too elaborate. How to fix? Honestly, the easiest way is to not use custom fonts for your book unless you have a really, really, really and I emphasize really good reason to do so because part of the appeal of ebooks and ereaders is that you can adjust the font size to whatever you want, which is also particularly important as people get older and it becomes harder to read small print. So if you have a font that is inherently difficult to read in your book, that is going to be a serious, serious speed bump to readers enjoying the book. So my advice for custom fonts is avoid if possible, and even if not possible, still try to avoid.

#4: Our fourth issue is basically the same as the third issue, except worse. Font sizes that can't be changed/hard coded text size. A bad font choice is made much worse if the ebook is hard coded to a certain font. This can happen if you use certain exporting tools to export your print book layout into an ebook layout, and sometimes the font size carries over with that.

People have strong feelings about fonts and some are more accessible than others, so it's very important not to do this. So how to fix this problem? Don't do it to begin with. It's bad and people will be mad at you. Do not hard set the font size in your ebook, and if you do it by accident, fix it if at all possible. That is my advice in this situation.

#5: A fifth potential ebook formatting issue is random hyphens in the middle of words that shouldn't be there. Random hyphens in the middle of words can happen if you convert a book from a PDF file to an EPUB file, and this means it's a very preventable formatting issue. The best way to avoid this is not to upload a PDF file or a Word file to Kindle Direct Publishing and the other ebook platforms, because while they do have automated tools for converting a PDF and a Word document to an EPUB, there's often weird formatting glitches that pop up like the random hyphenations.

The best way to avoid this is to use a proper tool to format your ebook like Vellum, Atticus, maybe Scrivener, maybe Kindle Create. So that is the best way to do that by preparing your own EPUB file and uploading that directly.

#6: A sixth issue is footnotes or bibliography or endnotes that don't link back to the original page. This also really annoys people. Footnotes and other links within books either need to be popups or linked back to the original page otherwise, readers will be deeply annoyed trying to return to their place each time and even fewer people will read them. And the best way to fix this is to make sure you have set up the footnotes, bibliography, or endnotes properly in a formatting program so that the links work. If you try to do this using a PDF or Word document you upload to the ebook platforms, it's probably not going to work. So it's best to, again, to create your own EPUB and upload it directly.

#7: A seventh thing that annoys readers is books without chapters or books without numbered chapters. Books without chapters or unnumbered chapters is a very annoying thing for readers, but most formatting software will help to create and number chapters. Now, how to fix? The technical explanation of this is an EPUB file is essentially a zipped version of several XHTML files and each XHTML file in the sort of zipped package should be its own chapter. The way an EPUB generates table of content files is that every chapter heading should have a H1 HTML key, and that it lets the EPUB know which heading should be chapters. Now you can hand code all this in a program like Sigil, but again, it's much easier to use a program like a Vellum, Atticus, or Kindle Create that will automatically create a proper table of contents for you rather than you having to go through with a XHML or EPUB editor like Sigil and then hand code the H1 tag.

It's much easier to automate this and there are applications that will do this for you.

#8: The eighth formatting problem that annoy readers is quotation marks the wrong way. What do we mean by that? Quotation marks come in two styles, straight and curly. Curly ones look like flipped commas, while straight quotation marks look more like two lines. Most word processing programs like Word will default the curly quotation marks and convert straight ones. Although curly quotations can sometimes create garbled formatting, they're considered to be the standard. How to fix? Honestly, the easiest way to fix this is to, if it's a problem for you, is to do a find and replace or a find and search. Just if you find that usually what happens is that if you hold down the shift key for too long while you're thinking and then you hit the quotation marks. Sometimes in certain operating systems, it'll convert it to straight quotation marks instead of curly ones. So if you are worried about a few of the wrong type of quotation marks showing up in your document, the easiest way to fix it is just a quick search through the document for straight quotation marks and then remove any ones that you see.

We've talked a lot about formatting ebooks and tools for formatting ebooks. So I thought I would suggest the three most popular applications for formatting ebooks, and those would be Vellum, Atticus, and Kindle Create. Vellum is most expensive, but I think it has most features, whereas Kindle Create is pretty simple, but it's free.

Vellum is Mac only. As I've mentioned before on the show, I started using it for print layout and then liked it enough that I switched over to using it for all my ebook formatting and that's been true for like the last eight years now. It's very easy to learn. It has excellent features and excellent support. I've never had any technical problems with it whatsoever. I'd say the biggest liabilities for it are that it's the most expensive of the options and it's Mac only. So if you don't have access to a Mac, you would need to choose another option.

The next option would be Atticus, which the advantage for Atticus is that it's cross platform. It will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux because it is foundationally a web application. It's also very collaborative in that you can invite other users to use it. The creator of the program, the guy who runs Kindlepreneur named Dave Chesson, has said he wants to create an all- in-one ebook creation, writing, and formatting tool with Atticus, and I think he's taken a pretty good stab at it. I'd say the biggest weakness for Atticus is that it does have a bit of a learning curve because there are so many different functions packed into it.

The free option would be Kindle Create, which is a program put out by Amazon. Kindle Create is pretty basic, but it does have everything you need and you can use it to create both files optimized for the Kindle platform and generic EPUBs that you can use on other platforms. I'd say its biggest weakness is that it's fairly simple and that it's produced by Amazon, which some people have strong feelings about, but it is free, which is hard to beat.

In Episode 251 (about a year ago), I talked about ebook formatting software and offered pros and cons for each. There isn't one perfect option, so it's good to look over the details for each one of them and watch one of the many available reviews or overviews available online to get a feel for how each one works differently.

And now the three strategies for finding formatting issues before your readers do.

#1: Test your ebook in each file format (PDF/EPUB) and on multiple devices. It's impossible and prohibitively expensive to test on every possible device, but try some of the most common devices and apps. It's important to test on a Kindle, an actual Kindle and not just on the app, for example.

#2: Check the page and chapter breaks in particular. These are the spots where odd formatting tends to cluster. Check all of them to make sure there's nothing weird that you need to fix.

#3: Check for legacy things from the print version like page numbers, the table of contents, and so forth. And I find that the easiest way to do all three of these at once is in my final phase of editing a book, I will have my computer read it aloud to me with text to speech and I find that's a good way to find any remaining typos. It's also a very good way of spotting formatting issues since you'll be looking over the entire book one more time and if there's like a weird gap or a line break or something of that nature, you're probably going to have a good chance of spotting it.

So in conclusion, ebooks can be a bit difficult to format, but there is dedicated software and a slew of tutorials and guides to help you do it. Learning a little bit of HTML and CSS can help, but it's not a requirement at this point. If you're self-publishing, having a well formatted book is important because readers either won't enjoy or won't even start a poorly formatted ebook. I hope these tips help you with knowing where to start with improving your ebook formatting.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your view on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.