Since I’ve decided to ‘test the waters’ with E-books before finishing the print versions of my sailing and scripture books, I have been digging into ways to get to a suitable format. Unfortunately I have not tagged everything I’ve read so I can’t give you many links, but here are some discoveries:
- The best E-book candidates are ones with lots of text that can re-flow when the reader chooses a different font size, orientation, or even a different device. Books with lots of pictures, tables, and diagrams are not the best candidates fro E-book formats.
- Microsoft WORD is the word processor of choice in preparing documents. Smashwords takes the .doc file directly while kindle takes the HTML conversion that WORD can make. I am gratified to read that my usage of WORD based on styles is the preferred way to go…no extra lines between paragraphs, no multiple spaces or tabs for the paragraph indents, and so on. Aside from inserted italics or bolding, the text should let the style determining everything.
- The table of contents is important for jumping to a specific place in the book…especially for non-fiction books where the reader can click to get right to the section of interest. WORD can easily create a multi-level table of contents in the document if the section heads use heading1, heading2, and heading3 styles. The only difference from doing it for print is to click the box to omit page numbers…the HTML version then inserts links to the specific places.
- The cover is still uncertain…there must be one. I can easily prepare a cover with Photoshop Elements (I often do that for the print books I publish with Lightning Source) and I have tried to put it at the front of the text file. It then appears there just fine but the goto for it…and the table of contents…are grayed out. Recent reading of Building Your Book for Kindle (a free E-book) seems to suggest that the key is to add bookmarks…a previously unused WORD feature…before converting to HTML.
- I am fighting against having to work in HTML. There MUST be a seamless way to get from WORD to the finished files…be they MOBI or EPUB. As long as you ‘go with the flow’ in terms of what you require of your E-book, I think the technology is there.
- There is presently a sharp split between Amazon (Kindle) and the rest of the world…especially EPUB (Kobe, Apple, and various others). I am leaning toward Amazon at the moment despite…or because of…their market dominance being in the USA.
- Proofing tools are important for testing your files before releasing them to the world. Kindle has a free previewer which (I think) includes (or at least automatically makes use of their file converter, kindlegen. The previewer lets you compile your HTML output from WORD and immediately test the way your E-book will look on the various supported devices…and then repeat the process until the final result is satisfactory.
- Money: all the tools, including the competing Smashwords, are free to use or download. The financial terms are typically around 70% to the author with the typical price to buy a download of an E-book being $2.99. High prices are about $9.99 and low prices are $0.99…although free is used for a short time to build interest and obtain reviews.
So there you have my present state of knowledge. The process, once you have a well-formatted WORD document, is quite simple…not the fearful HTML cutting and pasting I thought might be required. Now I have to get busy and finish the books.