Using Jutoh

One of the best things about Jutoh is that it's also a text editor. You can make changes directly to your text in Jutoh, no having to go back to your Word document and then resave or reupload.

Jutoh does not like doc files. You must upload a docx file.

When you set up your Word document, make sure that you are using styles. For the body of the document, it should be a normal style. You can modify the normal style by right clicking on it in the home menu. Once you right click, you can see modify and that's where you make the changes that determine what the normal style is. Beware: Word is funky. It depends on that normal style to format the document. Even if you've clicked on a certain font and size, if the underlying choices are different, Word will use what is in the normal style as the default.

For example, if you write your document, then select all and change the font to Garamond, 18 point, if the settings in the normal style are Times New Roman, 11 point, your document will really come out as Times New Roman, 11 point. What you see on your screen can be very misleading. You must go by what is set in the normal style.

Next, you want to break your chapters by starting each one as a heading, Usually, you can use heading 1. Right click on heading 1, click on modify, and choose your settings. Do this at the beginning of each chapter. You must do it this way for Jutoh to work properly, but it also allows you to change the font style, size, and whether you want to bold it or italicize it by simply changing the settings in heading 1 (or heading 2 or heading 3--whichever you choose to use, but use the same one consistently for each chapter heading) and it applies the change to all the text in that heading style. So if you want to change from one font to another, instead of going to each chapter heading and doing it manually, you can do it once by modifying the heading style and it automatically applies it to all chapter headings (as long as you've used the same heading style for each chapter).

Body of text: normal style
Chapters: heading style

You can either put in your links in Word by using the hyperlink function or you can put in the links in Jutoh.

Do not insert any page numbers. Do not use headers or footers. If you have them, remove them. An ebook is a fluid document and page numbers are irrelevant.

Once your Word document is clean, you can upload it to Jutoh. (It's far better to start with a properly formatted Word document, but if you are applying changes to a previously formatted document, you must clean it up before uploading. The best way to do that is to download the Smashwords guide--free from Amazon or Smashwords--and follow the directions to clean your formatting). Jutoh will ask for the file you want to upload. Browse until you find the correct file, then upload it. Remember, it won't upload a doc file, it must be a docx.

Jutoh goes through and separates each chapter (if you've used a heading style) into its own document. You can then go into each chapter and make any changes you want. If you prefer to have an image as your chapter headings (you do this if you want to preserve a certain font that matches your title because ebook readers all have limited fonts and generally apply one font to the entire document), you will need to insert those jpeg images.

You can create a jpeg image in Photoshop or another similar program. At the beginning of each chapter, insert the image under the edit menu in Jutoh. You can use styles in your Word document and bold them if you'd like, which is what many authors do. But if you want a more custom look, you can create images and insert them.Super easy.

You can see all the separated chapters (documents) on the left side and that's how Jutoh will build your Table of Contents. If there is a chapter heading you don't want, you can delete it. For example, in my book, as part of Chapter One, I have the title page and the copyright info because I didn't want those to be chapters. If you have 30 chapters, you will have 30 separate documents in Jutoh.

When everything looks the way you want it to, you choose which format to compile it in, click on compile and in less than a minute you have an ebook file. It will list any errors you might have so you can fix them. you need to compile for each ebook format you want.

Once you have your ebook file, you can upload it to the various sites.As of right now, my book is only on Kindle. I took my Mobi file from Jutoh and uploaded it. No problems. No issues. Slicker than slick.

I am not an affiliate for this product, so I don't get anything for recommending it. And I am the least technologically-abled person I know. If I can use this, anyone can. Believe me. If you want to create ebooks, I would highly, highly recommend Jutoh. It isn't too expensive and it's virtually headache-free. A great investment!

Purchase Jutoh.