Guest post: Tips for publishing your ebook
Posted By Sue Collier on September 30, 2011
I’m happy to welcome today’s guest, Ted Lacksonen, author of The Eagle Has Crashed and blogger at the CountryThinker, where he reflects on important issues confronting America from a forest-from-the-trees Country Class perspective. He recently shared with me his experience in publishing Eagle in ebook format, and I knew this was something from which many of my readers could benefit. Read on for a useful list of tips for authors who intend to publish their own ebooks.
Publishing ebooks—not as easy as it sounds
by Ted Lacksonen
I’ve been in the process of trying to get ebooks up, and it is nowhere as easy as people claim – at least if you want it done right (there are ways to half-ass the job, but that’s a good way to annoy your readers). Because I have been going through a lot of these steps, I thought I would share this tips with authors who intend to publish ebooks.
There are plenty of things that can be done early in the game that can make life easier when it comes time to convert to ebooks. I’ll be very general because this is a fast-changing area, and good information is very, very scarce out there. Even at that, this may be out of date within a year.
1) Encourage writers to get their books into Open Office instead of Word as early as possible. It’s a free open-source word processing program. Word files eventually get converted into HTML or XHTML files, and Word produces awful HTML code, and as of now, cannot produce XHTML files at all. Open Office can produce either, with good, clean code that converts nicely into various ebook file formats.
2) Do not use “normal” text. Doing so impedes usability on Kindle. Create custom text styles instead.
3) Use Heading 1 for chapters, Heading 2 for subchapters, etc. This is necessary to create Table of Contents. Note that even if the paper book doesn’t have a TOC (such as mine), the ebook will so users can maneuver through the book.
4) Use page breaks between chapters.
5) Do not use empty paragraphs, as they will be eliminated during conversion. Format paragraphs with spaces before or after instead.
6) Be very careful with the use of symbols (such as stars, diamonds, etc.). Most do not convert properly. Standard symbols such as copyright marks, etc. do fine.
7) KEEP UP WITH EDITS! If you are working with a graphics professional and editing is taking place at their end in InDesign, authors should make the same changes in their Word or Open Office file while the changes are fresh in their minds. The ebook will be created from the word processing file, not the InDesign file, so the reasons for keeping up with the changes should be obvious. Fortunately I had an electronic trail to go back and capture the changes to the EHC at the end of the process.
ON #7: You should start doing your ebooks in InDesign as soon as possible. CSS5.5 is a major step up in ePUB design possibilities and IndEsign is committed to becoming the page layout editor of choice for ebooks. You have a lot more control and the typography is so much better. This will be even more true as ePUB takes over the marketplace. The only place you should be using a word processor is for Smashwords (if that is actually selling books for you.)
Thanks for commenting, David. I think most authors are not necessarily going to invest in InDesign, so the point of the article is to give DIY authors some pointers on what to do to make it easier for them to handle the ebook process themselves. Because of course they can always pay to have it done, but often budgets don’t permit that. Appreciate you weighing in, though.
[...] I’m pleased to welcome author and blogger Ted Lacksonen with a very timely post today. He’s written for us before; don’t miss his previous post on publishing your ebook. [...]