Wattpad brings you a guest post from Frank Coles, author of mystery thriller Dark Market (Assassins Rule #1):
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Want to publish a novel quickly and easily on websites and ereaders with no massive technical knowhow? Well, you’re in the right place. Here’s how to get your novel and cover up on Wattpad in the next ten minutes for simple documents or an hour for full novels. You want it to look good and read how it should after all. So, first thing we need to do:
BACK UP
Before we begin back up a copy of your final draft, you DO NOT want to lose all that hard work now do you?
Then you’ll need a clean Word document. Ideally when you’re writing your book only use the ‘normal’ paragraph style, bold, italics, underline and use heading 1, heading 2 or bold for your chapter headings. Keep it simple.
WHY WATTPAD?
Wattpad’s simple formatting options allow you to publish your story to a number of platforms like Google Books, Sony and Scribd with minimal fuss. It’s also a social network and if you engage with other readers and writers you’ll find your reading numbers just go up and up. You won’t be able to charge for it however, for that you’ll need to look at Smashwords and Amazon, and if there’s enough interest out there I’ll write something on this as well. But hey, no more mucking about, let’s get started.
PUBLISH IN TEN MINUTES OR LESS
I’m going to use the first three sections my book How to Drive a Tank…and Other Everyday Tips for the Modern Gentleman for this.
1. Open the word file of your final Word document.
2. Select all text and hit copy. For PCs that’s Control+A, for Macs Command+A.
3. Open Notepad on PC or TextEdit on Mac.
4. Paste your copied document into the file: Control+V or Command+V.
5. Save as a plain text file. That’s a file with .txt as the extension.
6. Go to your Wattpad profile image and name at the top of the screen and hit the ‘My Works’ link.
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7. Select the ‘new story’ link in the upper right hand part of the screen.
8. Hit the ‘Upload a file’ link in the lower centre screen.
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9. Enter your book title.
10. Quick format your text using bold for Chapter/Section Headings.
11. Save your META options on the right hand side of the screen.
12. Hit ‘Save and Publish’.
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Okay, you’re done. You won’t have your book split into chapters, there’ll be no italics and no cover. For that, jump to the cover section below or use the more robust publishing option that follows, where you’ll keep your bold and italics, separate chapters, and set up a table of contents.
PUBLISH IN AN HOUR
I’m going to use my thriller Dark Market as an example here. It shouldn’t take long so just bash through these steps to get your perfect upload.
First, please remove any images from the original text as Wattpad won’t display them. Then only use a symbol like * or *** for section spaces within chapters.
IMPORT YOUR TEXT
1. Go to your Wattpad profile
2. Go to your name at the top of the screen and hit the ‘My Works’ link.
3. Select the ‘new story’ link in the upper right hand part of the screen.
4. Enter your book title.
5. Go to your Microsoft Word document and select the first section of your book. In this case, for me, it’s the copyright page, but it could be the intro, author note, table of contents or chapter one for you. Copy the text and paste it into the content screen on the Wattpad interface.
6. Hit ‘Save’ at the bottom of the screen.
7. Copy and paste the rest of your book by chapter in the order you need. So if you want an author page followed by an intro at the front do that first and title each page as you want them: Author Note/Intro and so on.
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Note: This last step is what gives your book that nice drop-down table of contents.
FORMAT YOUR TEXT
When you’ve finished importing go to your ‘My Works’ link again. You’ll see your book with a basic temporary cover. Click ‘Edit’ on your story and it’ll take you back to the editing screen. You’ll now see that any centered formatting has disappeared and that everything is left aligned. Wattpad should have kept your bold, underline and italics in place. Wattpad is only a simple formatter however, so remember to keep formatting to a minimum in your original document. This goes for all other ebook formats out there. Here are the next steps:
7. If there are excess spaces in your document hit the ‘remove spaces’ icon at the top of the text-input window - a curved arrow with a red line through it.
8. Add in spaces where you want them, say between the chapter title and the first line.
For those section breaks marked with a * symbol, if you’ve center-aligned them you’ll find them back over on the left and no way to format them. There are two options available to you, either:
Delete them and add in 2-3 line breaks, this should be more than enough to indicate to the reader that there is a narrative switch or jump.
Or:
Leave them in but add spaces with the space bar before the symbol. You need about 30 spaces, Wattpad adds in about 30 more, but once you’ve got it lined up right, just copy the symbol including the spaces before (see image: select everything highlighted in blue) and paste it wherever you need it.
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You could of course do this for any other part that you want aligned in this way, say chapter headings. But it’s a lot of work. My advice, keep it simple!
BASIC META DATA
Ignore the META info on the right hand side when you’re uploading, it’s quicker to go through each file at the end as you can copy and paste the tags you need rather than having to type it out every time.
Categories
So when you’ve finished uploading go back through your files and choose your categories, is your book a mystery, a thriller, a romance? Make anote in a seprate file so you have a reference.
Tags
What about tags? For Dark Market, I use “action, adventure, assassin, conspiracy”. Wattpad only accepts one-word tags, so just type them in with a comma between each one and you’re done. Keep the tags copied on your clipboard as you go through each file and simply paste (Control+V/Command+A).
Copyright
Pick your copyright attribution.
Rating
Is your work kid friendly or so dark that only a serial killer would read it? Pick your age rating.
Distribution.
Where do you want to publish? Wattpad only or Google Books, Sony Ebookstore and Scribd?
Each section is pretty self-explanatory but for full easy read guidelines go here: http://www.wattpad.com/guidelines
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ADVANCED META DATA
Hit the link for advanced. Here you can add book links, YouTube videos and photosets to go with your book. Again keep these links in a separate file if you want to quickly copy and paste them on each chapter page.
CHECKLIST
Here’s my quick checklist to see if everything is as it should be.
Chapter and section headings - are they all the same? E.g. Bold, left aligned.
Spacer elements - are they all consistent?
Are all the titles/chapter numbers correct?
Is all the meta data there?
THE COVER
The cover might be the last thing we’ll do here, but it is the first thing your readers will see, so make it good. Have a look at what other people are doing, find a selection of covers that you like and then make your own version in a program like Photoshop. You can find free background or mood images on sites like http://www.sxc.hu/.
Your final cover for Wattpad needs to be 245 wide by 400 pixels high (it’ll be different for other sites). To get your image looking right open a new file in your image editor with the above dimensions and drop your cover image into it. Resize to fit, save as a jpg and upload by going to ‘My Works’. Select the ‘cover’ link then, when the pop-window appears, choose your image.
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Right then, how does it all look? Good I hope. If not, go back and walk through the steps again, there may be something you missed. Feel free to ask questions in the comments below I’ll answer when I can. Happy writing, happy reading.
Start reading Dark Market on Wattpad - free!