Okay, so you’ve got your tools downloaded and installed. It might seem like a cool idea to produce a “special edition” of your book for the iPad, a version that has a more sophisticated layout or embedded media, but unless you have a very good reason to do this and are dedicated to doubling or tripling your work, don’t do it. For straight-on fiction, non-fiction, biography or any other book that’s not graphics-heavy or full of fancy charts and learning-aids, iBooks Author is simply overkill. Apple is in full-court-press mode trying to become the go-to platform for design-heavy digital publications like recipe books, how-to books and, especially, text books. Books published in iBook format are best built in a very nice tool provided for free by Apple, called iBooks Author. One aside on the ‘Tools’ front: Apple supports a variation on the ePub format called iBook. Apple’s utility for loading your book to the iTunes Store. ![]() A Word template that conforms to your POD provider’s requirements Generally, it’s good to get this template from your POD service, so if you’re having Createspace do your print-on-demand book, download and use a Createspace template.This is an excellent way to validate your formatting by uploading your ePub onto your own iPad or iPhone so you can leaf through and see how it looks. ![]() If you have an iPhone or iPad, download Apple’s Book Proofer application.an ePub validation checker, like the excellent one provided by Google.Calibre, for adding “metadata” tags to your nearly-ready e-book.To follow my route here are the tools you need: You can reverse this order if you like, and do the ePub conversion first and use that version for all platforms including Amazon. Using Calibre greatly simplifies things.The summary of my approach is 1) to produce a print copy first and publish it on Createspace, and let CreateSpace do the work of producing your ePub version for Amazon/Kindle, 2) produce an ePub version that works across all other platforms, 3) publish that ePub to iTunes, Nook, Kobo and Smashwords. The attached graphic is my older, more complex workflow. ![]() Getting your manuscript off the laptop and into stores. If so, you have two conversion tasks in front of you: First, converting to ePub format for digital publishing, and second, converting to a printable template for output to Createspace, or some other print-on-demand service. Like most authors, you probably wrote your book in Microsoft Word, and you probably wrote it in a template that made for easy editing and perhaps submission to agents and publishers. My goal was to get my book onto as many platforms as possible, price it at one or two dollars per digital copy so my target audience of young readers could afford it, produce some sort of paper version and share as little as possible of my royalty with anyone aside from my family, friends and Ian, down at The White Horse who lets me run a tab. But it’s no longer necessary to know this stuff to get your book out. Internally, ePub documents are formatted in HTML, and it’s nice to know that and nice to be able to tune your html for greatest efficiency. When I first wrote this article I said that you need to know some HTML markup language, but in fact there is an easier workflow that does require such knowledge. In the previous article we looked at what ePub is and how you can use Smashwords as your single-step, almost free approach to ePublishing.īut I took a slightly more complex route. This article has been rewritten (January 20, 2014) to reflect a simpler workflow and the use of Calibre. Calibre, however, is still around and continues to be a mainstay for ePublishers. Note: Since this article was originally published, the Google ePub package known as Sigil has been left without support, which is too bad, because it was a solid, useful tool and the one I had come to depend upon.
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