Now comes the hard part.
How do we decide which authors are OK and which are not? We look at their previews, and sometimes—for example if a book is available for free—we download the whole book and crack it open in Sigil. (If your book has DRM at this stage, you automatically fail our test.)
And we grade on the familiar American A,B,C,D,F scale. A is outstanding, C is Okay, and F is failure. Our grading resembles that of the nice elementary school teacher who liked to put hearts and smilies on stuff, even if it wasn't really first rate. We just don't want to read stuff that really looks like it sucks, especially if it would be nice to read had the author only put in a little more effort to polish it up.
If your basic grammar looks like you didn't pass ninth-grade English, you won't get an A, for sure. We may even give it an F or send it to the dreaded shredder. And, for what it's worth: we can usually tell the difference between a ditzy narrator and a ditzy writer, even in first-person narrative. Oh, and don't even think you'll pass with a D if you hand us a second-person narrative, or one written entirely in present tense—both of those result in an automatic F. Yuck!
If the punctuation is really inconsistent, incorrect a lot of the time, and/or it looks like you didn't get anyone at all to copy-edit it, not even your cat, then you won't get an A.
If you have lots of run-on sentences, can't punctuate direct quotation sort-of correctly, can't spell to save your life... You won't get an A.
Almost all Indie books we download—as well as most books from "big" publishers—have really sucky formatting. I mean, they stink. The only books we've ever seen that get an A in formatting are those published (for free) by Feedbooks.com, like this one: Llana of Gothol. Go look at those books on Feedbooks, and emulate them, because they do not suck. They are pretty much the only books that we don't have to mess with somehow before reading.
If you double-space your book, forget it; you won't get an A. Modern e-reading devices have pretty high resolution and pages can look pretty much like paper books without a lot of effort. And this isn't an English class where your teacher requires double-spacing anyway; quite the opposite.
Oh, and if we think we want to actually read your whole book, but we give up on trying to format it reasonably, you get an F. Sorry.
What we want to see in a novel is cheerful page after charming page of single spaced, fully justified paragraphs with an "em" or two of indentation apiece. We want the chapters, if any, to be in the table of contents and to have consistent headers that make use of HTML styles—such as "h2", "h3" and so forth. We want the fonts to be consistently sized, and the line-spacing to be reasonable. We don't care what font you use, or try to use, because you shouldn't be specifying any fonts, just the default. (If you have a really good reason, you can embed a font in your EPUB, but you'd better have a darn good reason for forcing us to read in that font, if it's not one we like.
We'll think of more stuff, just give us some time...
Click me home again,
Kathleen...
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