Self Publishing – Step 1. Format – Part 2

Posted by Ironspike on Feb 14, 2011 in Writing | 0 comments

So, here I am trying to self publish some of my work. In my last article I went straight into publishing for the kindle and going the e-book route.

There are other ways a person could self-publish their books. A family friend wrote a book about the small town I lived in while growing up. Once the book was completely finished the author went to kinkos and printed out about 100 hard back books. She then sold them to folks around town.

Now, this is a way to self publish and there isn’t anything wrong with it. But, you will severely limit your audience if you go this route.

Over the past few months I’ve learned all kinds of cool stuff when it comes to be a self publishing author. For instance, CreateSpace is a place where you can upload your e-book and have it converted to an actual hard back. I found this totally interesting! There are other online sites that do this too.

What makes this cool is that they split the profit with you on the sale of your book. While you might not make a lot when folks order a hard back, you still do no go out a lot of money upfront.

Let me get back on task here. When I started converting my writing in the Kindle (mobi) format I looked up various samples on the internet. Now, in all honesty there wasn’t a lot. I manage to dig up a format guideline pdf from Amazon.

Using this guideline I created my first eBook. Cover page, table of content, the works. It was a lot of work in HTML and considering I found it ‘labor intensive” and I’m an IT programmer!

I gen’ed my book and viewed it on the various Kindle readers (windows, iphone, actual kindle) and I was pleased with my work.

I will say that I suck at drawing so my cover art is little lack luster. Now, I haven’t published that book yet because I’m in the middle of putting together a short story collection. My plan is to publish both at the same time.

So, I down loaded several eBooks from Amazon – some free and some not. And while I read them I make notes on the differences between my eBook and theirs.

This is what I have noticed:

Now, content on all the one I’ve read is fine. I’m the last person to critique someone’s writing. However, layout in most cases is weak.

It took me a while to figure out what why. Between the time I started manually creating my own e-book and the time I finished my first one – Amazon had upgraded their e-book services. Now, you can upload your material in a pdf format, msword format, and txt format.

This allowed authors to just upload their material as one giant document. So here I am reading this cool book called The Accidental Demon Slayer (at least I liked it) and my Kindle dies on me. It reboots and for the life of me I cannot figure out where I was. I couldn’t skip ahead by chapters because there wasn’t a table of contents and I didn’t set a book mark.

Another eBook had fonts on one page in one size but the next page it was really small. Some had dead end hyperlinks and graphics that was unreadable.

Now, granted not everyone has the time or expertise to meticulously set up their eBook. I know. However, being from the programming field I’m a stickler for the user interface.

Overall, all of these really are not big detractors and easy to deal with from the readers perspective.

However, if you are a perfectionist then get to learning some HTML because your going to need it.

Self Publishing – Step 1. Format

Posted by Ironspike on Feb 7, 2011 in General, Writing | 0 comments

Self Publishing – Step 1.  Format

As I said in a pervious post I wasn’t out to try and publish my works. That changed last year when I started writing some material and couldn’t stop. I was on a writing high (if there is such a thing). Material just flowed out of me and on to paper (more accurately –  MS Word). When I stopped I had A LOT of material.

Then like a brick – it hit me – ‘I think other folks would like this!’

That was when my journey of self publishing really took off. I wasn’t going to ‘print’ my material myself – I needed an electronic format. My options would be to go with an online solution such as Amazon or one of the other online eBook providers.

I did some research and it seemed logical to me to go with Amazon. In my mind since Amazon sold the number one e-reader on the planet – that going with them would be the best route. Now a lot has changed in the e-book world since then, more companies have entered the market, Amazon changed up it’s royalty programs, etc.

However, I still decided to stick with Amazon for my choice of e-book publishing.

This brings me into format of an e-book. My number one concern was getting my book that was in MSword format into a readable e-book.

I found several ways to do this:

1. Upload a supported file and have Amazon convert it for you.
2. Use Amazon’s Kindlegen.exe and create your own e-book and upload it.
3. Create an e-book in a supported format that Amazon can convert.

After reading countless conversion horror stories on the Amazon KDP forums – I decided that I would use Kindlegen.exe and convert and create my e-book myself.

This turned out to be a big pain in my ass but well worth it.

In a nutshell Kindlegen.exe will take a group of files (html files mostly) and convert them into a e-book with the *.mobi extensions. These files are natively handled on the Kindle which means they could just be dragged and dropped on to the device to proof.

The .mobi files are also used on mobile devices and mobi readers too. Using an html editor I started the long task of converting my MSWORD file into html. I found it easier for me to create multiple html files – by breaking the book apart by chapter. The mobi format requires a toc and .prc file too. These files help in navigation of chapters.

I would use Kindlegen.exe to combine all these into a e-book. At the time I didn’t have a kindle but I was able to open up the file locally on my desktop with the kindle app. It wasn’t until after Christmas when I got my Kindle that I actually was able to read my e-book in it’s final form.

Now, I think I went the hard way by controlling every aspect of my e-book creation. However, at least I know it’s presented in the EXACT way I think it should be.