Thread: creating an ebook

I've been looking around for some instruction on making an ebook, as I'm trying to put together a children's story and put it in ebook form. Any one have any advice as to the best way to go about this? I've found a free template for creating ebooks on ezau.com, but haven't downloaded it yet, as I'm just not sure that this is the best way to go. I've been creating my book in Microsoft Office Word, thinking to make it a PDF.

A Microsoft word PDF converter works well since you can keep the format of your MSword page. And you won't have any problems in formatting since it's got a great conversion rate.

I've tried converting ebooks with a lot of graphic content to EPUB, using calibre. I find that the whole layout gets screwed up. Various people that I've spoken to advise me that it's best to just stick with PDF format for anything with image content but I'm open for any other suggestions that people may have.

Thank you both, that's what I'll do then. Just stick to the PDF format.

Has anyone got any tips on hoiw to monetise the whole thing? I hear that Paypal do a sales section where they'll monitor your payments but they wont deliver the files (obviously). Is there a completely hands-free method of ebook sales where the customer gets their product stratight away and pays instantly too?

Craig

Have you checked out Lulu?

You can set up an account with Payloadz to upload files which can then be instantly downloaded upon receipt of payment through Paypal.

Payloadz

There is an open source program I use for my PDF magazine called Scribus which is free to download and use. It is great for picture heavy documents and once you get the hang of it its a nice little free program.

As for publishing an E Book there are a few venues, including Amazon, Smash words..

If you only publish in pdf format, then you will limit yourself to the number of people who can access your material. I would recommend using smashwords as they do all the converting for you into a wide variety of formats so that they can be read on the ipad, kindle, mobile phones etc. They don't use DRM so people could 'steal' your material and pass it on to their friends, but, at the moment, this isn't too much of a problem. If you do use smashwords, I would recommend their 'nuclear' approach to preparing a text. Basically, take your word document, copy the text, paste it into a notepad file (which clears a lot of the word formatting) then paste it back into a new doc file. The last eight e.books I've uploaded have passed their formatting test with flying colours. If you want something a bit more sophisticated, have a look at dnl software which allows you to add graphics, audio, multimedia and even DRM. You would have to pay for the dnl software but it is good - although it only works on PCs, not mobiles, ipads, toasters etc.

Hallo! I've just joined the forum, mainly because I noticed that you have a section on new media writing, which is my particular area of interest. As regards the creation of ebooks, there's an excellent piece of WYSIWYG open-source (ie. free) software called Sigil which I've been using - you can get it from sigil - Project Hosting on Google Code . It creates ebooks in the .epub format. It's really good and easy to use, but even so I think you need to know something about HTML and CSS to get good results out of it - HTML (hypertext markup language) is the language in which web pages are created, and CSS (cascading style sheets) is the code which specifies how different elements should be displayed (for example what background colour a page should have, what font and size the text should be, how wide the margins should be, etc. etc.)

I don't want to get into shameless plugs, but I've just set up a section on my own website (www.edwardpicot.com) - Personal website of Edward Picot) offering my services to any authors who would like to turn their books into ebooks and feel that the technicalities are beyond them. I think there's going to be quite a demand for this in the next few years, particularly among the self-publishing fraternity.

- Edward

I bit the bullet and purchased InDesign, which will output both PDF & ePub formats. The learning curve for InDesign is steep, so unless you are seriously going into this, you might be better off hiring someone, primarily for the ePubs. You can produce totally acceptable PDF's with MS Word or other such programs--those are easy, but ePub is quirky whenever you are trying to do something more than straight text, and even pagination, italics, chapter breaks, and such take special handling to make them present properly on all readers.

The tech out there is all different too, so are the eReader programs. Things are slowly becoming more standardized, but we're not really there yet, IMO.

We're definitely not there! I just bought myself a cheap e-reader - the Elonex ebook, which is cheap and available from Waterstone's, and which I chose (a) because it was cheap and (b) because someone gave me a Waterstone's voucher for Christmas. The ebook is in colour, but it completely ignores CSS formatting and displays everything in the same font and the same paragraph-style. It seems to handle images okay, though. The rule seems to be, however, that if you put a lot of formatting into an ebook you have to bear in mind that it may all get steamrollered, so the best thing to do is keep everything really simple.

https://dtp.amazon.com
for publishing on amazon ebooks. i e-mailed a similar question to author T.Lynne Tolles, she told me about that site. she told me it was easy to do.

What's really cool now is all the free reader apps out, so if you have an iPhone or Android you can download the apps for free. I've heard the Nook app for Android is superb, and I've tried the Bluefire Reader app on an iPhone--it kept all my formatting, but changed all the fonts to a single font style. (This seems pretty typical of most of the reader apps right now,) Still, it kept all the paragraph and page formatting, as well as italics and my embedded hyperlinks.

Weird: to get my book readable on an iPad, I had to download the same Bluefire Reader app--then it worked great. Otherwise there was no way I could find to get the book into the iPad's library. It seems it will only put books there that you purchase through the iBook store--what a surprise!

Everything is moving toward readers that will read anything though, and it will all catch up pretty soon. ePub seems to be the format of choice too.

I am also interested. I've done some self-publishing of printed books locally (i.e. Singapore). But as mailing overseas is not cheap, I'd like to pursue publishing future books as e-books.
To gain experience, I've bought myself a Kindle. I'm still not too familiar with it.