I’ve started using the Reedsy Book Editor to format my most recent non-fiction book for ebook and print and so far, it has been a little bit of a frustrating experience as I learn the ropes.
One of the first things I learned was that most of the time I spent applying header styles in Microsoft Word was wasted. I thought I would be able to set the chapters manually in Reedsy, but I was mistaken. When I uploaded the file, it automatically identified chapters for me. Unfortunately, it got them all wrong and the only way I have found to fix that so far is by hand.
The editor interpreted each of my “Header 1” styles as a chapter, which was not what I wanted. Ironically, since I didn’t format the parts of the book that actually had the chapter titles as “Header 1”, they weren’t recognized. So, I have had to create manual chapter breaks there. Since the editor does not allow me to drag-drop sections to nest them, that means that I have to manually copy all of the content from each of the automatically-created (non-)chapters into the actual chapter file where I want it to appear.
Next time, I think I’m only going to format the chapter titles as H1 and everything else needs to be H2 or lower. Since I already have more than three header styles (the maximum that Reedsy allows), I think I’ll have to manually format sub-sub headers past a certain point.
It’s annoying to have to redo work, but this is still a lot easier than formatting with HTML and Calibre, at least so far!