Has anyone on this forum ever self-published an ebook? What format/service did you use? Have any of the programmers on this site ever dealt with formatting or publishing ebooks for others?

I'm exploring ebook self-publishing as a possibility for the near future. Currently I'm looking at KDP - Kindle Direct Publishing with Amazon. I'm curious if anyone else has done this, or if any programmers have experience in this area. I might have some questions...

I have some research materials from Michael Stackpole if you have specific questions. It's part of his Digital Career Guide packet, and it should give instructions on how to format if KDP doesn't do it for you.

Thanks, Tim! I've been reading on the KDP help pages, and I understand how to use HTML to format my book. I know a bit of HTML, so I should be able to handle that, with a little bit of help from my programmer friends if I need it.

What I don't know, though, is what kind of file I should be formatting the HTML-marked text in. How do I get that, plus the images and what not, all together in a zipped file? I'm clueless there...

I've looked into this Phili, and don't have an answer yet.

Also, can someone move this to Herald's Hall please?

Moved.

I'm going to be keeping an eye on this topic, like all the topics in the Heralds' Hall.

I have all my books available as ebooks. I've used KDP and Smashwords. For formatting, I use Word and upload a Word doc. I'll elaborate later when I get home from work. (Not easy typing a response from an iPod, lol!)

Back home from work:

Okay, like I said, I use Word to format my ebooks. I do know basic HTML, but I've never attempted it. Seemed like it would take longer to do that way, but since I've never tried it, I don't know. I think you can edit HTML in Word, but I don't know for sure. For anyone using Word, use this: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52 I pretty much followed it step by step. It's all on how to format for Smashwords, but it works just fine for uploading to KDP too.

As long as you're going to upload to KDP, I would say upload to Smashwords too. It's just as easy, and not only can people download other formats from there, your books will also go onto Barnesandnoble.com to download for the Nook.

And now a couple tips off the top of my head about making your ebook look as professional as possible. Make sure the text is fully justified like in a paperback and not ragged right. Also, you will want to make your indents smaller, not just the inch or so you indent with the tab button. You'll notice in books how the paragraph indents are only around a quarter inch. I usually do 0.3" in Word.

Happy to help with any questions if I can.

Thank you so much for the reply, Molly! That is very good to know about Smashwords. I tried to check out the site, but many of the pages were down, so I'd stashed it aside - and then someone else encouraged me to do both KDP and Smashwords at the same time, as it covers all possible bases. Now that I've had a HWer tell me the same thing, I think I will do just that.

I'm surprised to hear that about Word formatting. From reading the KDP help section, it sounded like using Word for formating could result in problems during the transfer, because Word has HTML embedded into it. You also can't set the font to be just "default font," I don't think, which I read was the preferred way to format. Have you ever had any issues with your Word formatting? Once you've uploaded your Word file to KDP, is there a way to "preview" it to make sure it looks appropriate?

Thanks again for the advice!

I haven't read it in a while, but I think KDP's help section makes things sound like a bigger deal than they really are. When I've followed the style guide I mentioned from Smashwords, I haven't had any trouble at all.

Here's the basics of what I do. In the guide it talks about the "Nuclear Method." Basically, you paste your text into a text document. That completely eliminates all formatting so you're starting from scratch. That gets the best results. The downside is it all eliminates all your italics and you have to go through and redo them. But when I tried not doing it this way, there were some problems. So I copy the text from the text document back into Word and use the basic Times New Roman size 12. The chapter headings are about 16. I changed the paragraph indents just like it explains in the guide. I use the page break at the end of every chapter so the new chapter will start on a new page and not in the middle of one. Then I make a linked table of contents (which is also explained in the guide), and that's about it. Whenever I do it just like that, it turns out perfectly. I haven't done anything with pictures yet, but I'm sure that would work too.

As for a preview, I'd upload the book to Smashwords first because you can download your own book. If it looks good there, it should work for Kindle. After you upload it to Kindle and it's live, you can download a sample to look at. They do have a preview when you're first uploading, but it's really confusing and you really can't tell if everything looks okay.

Molly, I can't tell you how helpful that was! I will definitely read the Smashwords style guide and follow your suggestions. Formatting in Word would be very helpful for me, as I plan to have illustrations. I don't know how to format pictures in HTML, but I am pretty handy with formatting in Word.

Thank you again!

*shakes head vehemently* I don't know about Smashwords or anything, but Word for HTML is awful. Beyond awful, actually. Pasting the text into notepad would work, I would guess, but I recommend going HTML all the way

eru

Maybe you can tell me then, sir - in what program do I format HTML? I know how to do some basic HTML, but I'm not sure what program to type the text in. How do I combine that text file with the images in a zipped file for uploading to Kindle? Any help would be very appreciated, as I'm a bit lost on how to put an HTML file together.

HTMl files can be composed in notepad, and then saved as .html files.

eru

Okay, that clears things up a lot. When I actually get to the stage of formatting my book, I may come begging for help... (Well, I'll probably just start a topic, so everyone can benefit...)

*smiles* OK.

eru

HTML editors...

On Ubuntu we use a program called seamonkey. I'm not sure if that's available for Windows or not...

On Windows I use something really, really obscure called Nvu. I could probably find a download link if I looked hard enough. I'm pretty sure it's free or I wouldn't be using it.

I prefer something like that over a plain text editor because you can switch between the HTML code and a preview of what it looks like. I really like being able to see what I'm doing, rather than working blindly, hoping I got my tags right.

Ooh... that would be helpful. I might have to look into that.

Nvu has since been discontinued, but some guys picked it back up as KomPozer:

http://kompozer.net/

It's based off of the Mozilla rendering engine, and it's a good HTML editor.

eru

Thank you, thank you bazillions!

*is surprised "bazillion" is actually a word...*

Ah, thanks, Eruheran. That explains why I couldn't find it when I had to reinstall last year. I just assumed it was someplace I hadn't looked and gave up and found my original download, but that would make sense. *stores away information carefully*

Now that I've been there, done that, I think I should come back and share my experiences...

Read Smashwords' Style Guide. If you read it through once to get the hang of it, you should only have to reference it later if you want to do something more complicated (like linked table of contents or something). For the rest of it, once I read it I got the hang of it. If you "show formatting" and use Word's font styles as described in the Style Guide, it is very easy to format.

I had absolutely no problems with the text portion of my Smashwords upload. No errors, accepted to the premium catalog without question. All the problems I had were as a result of images - I had to be careful about placing page breaks and extra returns around images, because that generated blank pages a couple of times.

The Style Guide also works for publishing directly on Amazon, with one exception - because Amazon's method handles page breaks differently, don't put extra returns before your page breaks at the end of chapters. You might generate blank pages, and Amazon honors your page breaks so you don't need the extra returns. On Smashwords you need the extra returns because some of their formats don't honor page breaks. I used the extra returns + page breaks as the Style Guide suggested, and it seemed to work nicely.

Now that I know how to use the font styles, I can actually get the basic formatting in as I draft. When I have to copy and paste stuff, however, pasting it into Notepad to clear the formatting is very helpful. The Style Guide calls it the "nuclear method," and it works great.

Very interesting.

It looks like I'm about a year late to the discussion. No worries.

Plenty of good advice here on ebook publishing. I'll add a couple things.

If you write in Word (using formatting tips from the Smashwords Style Guide and with a wary eye on hard returns) and then save as html, then zip the html files up, KDP will happily accept those for upload. It'll accept a Word .doc file as well, of course, but it'll usually mess it up in some way. I've done quite a few books on KDP using the .doc to html method and it has worked smoothly each time.

Publishing on Smashwords is a definite plus for two good reasons. One, they'll spawn your books to the smaller ebook selling sites: Kobo, Sony, iBooks, etc. Caveat: I would recommend removing Barnes & Noble from the Smashwords publish list and go direct through their Pubit site. Pubit/B&N is the second biggest ebook selling site after Amazon and you will want the direct control, monthly payments, and real time reporting (Smashword's downside is that reporting is sporadic and payment is only once per quarter). Apple/iBooks also allows direct publishing, but I think you need a Mac to do so. Kobo is up and running (Kobo Life) with their direct publishing setup but it is apparently extremely glitchy, so most people are steering clear until they get their act together.

The second valuable thing about Smashwords is that they allow you to set up discount and free coupons for your books. You can generate a coupon code for a book, set it at 50% off or 100% off or whatever, and then use that for marketing, giveaways, etc.

The ebook share of the market has been steadily climbing for quite some time. I would encourage everyone to investigate it carefully.

I've published a bit with Smashwords, and I like their simple style. Everything on that is pretty basic, and has already been covered here. You read through the style guide a few times and you've pretty much got it.

Only thing is that you have to make double-sure you check your hyperlinks in the table of contents, those can get mixed up sometimes.

You're never too late to join the conversation. These threads will always be here for reference when new authors come along. Great thoughts, guys!

*new author comes along and is happy he's not late to the party*

Perfect timing for finding this thread, as I'm going to be publishing my first ebook in a couple months. The information is quite helpful.

I agree with Christopher that publishing directly on Barnes and Noble is a good idea (aside from Amazon, which is a given). I've read that Smashwords is a little clunky and one-size-fits-all in terms of the ebook they produce, but I think it's still a valuable resource, especially for getting into iBooks, which apparently is a notorious pain.

For formatting, I write my books in a Word document. There's free software called calibre that can format your document (might not have Word as option for input) into all of the standard files: ePub, mobi, html, azw, the list goes on. I haven't used it yet, but I'm going to. From there, you can upload your document onto whatever site using their recommended format: Barnes and Noble prefers ePub and Amazon prefers mobi. Amazon accepts many formats, however. (Note. PDF is bad to convert from according to calibre's website.)

Here's the link http://calibre-ebook.com


Agree wholeheartedly.

I could go on and on, but it's getting late and I need my sleep. I'll definitely be back, though.