| Kathleen Cook |
For a lot of you, Create Space is the only way to publish books. It’s easy, free, and heck, they even have a “take this book to Kindle” button that makes it easy to publish your print book as an ebook. Why not just press it? … You know you want to.
If you’re like me, you’ve carefully formatted your print version and spent a lot of time making sure that all the pages in the “preview” look as good as you intended. After you’ve perfected it and published the print version, that little “import to Kindle” button is so tempting. Why not?
If you’ve tried it, then you already know the answer to that question. Simply, the ebook version sucks. The formatting is off, the pages run together, the chapters look “funny,” although you can’t put your finger on it. There is no TOC to speak of, or at least it doesn’t link well. Your book looks like a fifth grader published it. That’s what you get for pressing that “import to Kindle” button after your print book was finished.
Now it’s time to backtrack and do some homework. Familiarize yourself with epublishing terms such as epub, mobi, and other formats. Find a good epub editor and learn to use it. It’s scary, at first, because it’s just so much simpler to press a button than it is to read a software manual. Trust me, if I can do it, so can you.
There are quite a few free and paid programs out there to create epub files. Since my son is a computer programmer, I’ve been privileged to try a few paid versions, such as Adobe InDesign. Frankly, I wasn’t impressed. It’s probably good for people with a 4-year computer science degree like my son, but for me, uh-uh, I can barely distinguish the difference between a megabit and a megabyte.
Stick with the free ones; they aren’t appreciably worse than the fancy schmancy, hundred-buck versions. I know that Scrivener is a lot cheaper than that, maybe 40 bucks or so, but I still don’t think it’s worth the money. I’ll take free any day . . . I’m cheap.
My favorite free epub editor is Sigil. I’ve been using it since 2009, and every year it seems to get better. I use the Sigil 7.0 version, which has very good reviews and is available as a free download from Softonic. The latest release for Sigil is version 9.0 which came out just a few weeks ago. I can’t guarantee that one since I don’t know much about it, but the 7.0 version is a breeze, once you read the online manual and tinker with it for a few hours. It’s time well spent, if you’re going to publish a lot of books, or hope you will!
I’ve also heard good reviews on Calibre. I confess, the only reason I haven’t tried it is because I was so happy with Sigil, I never felt the need to look into it. Some friends swear by Calibre, and it’s also free. You can try both versions and see which one you like better.
If you want to create books for the iPad, you can try iBooks Author, (also free, of course). I don’t know that much about it, but when you have three geeky sons like me, who spend all of their time reviewing or using a variety of pro-grams (two for a living), then you get to know people who have tried everything. This one has good reviews from both friends and online.
Frankly, I’ll stick with my Sigil. With it, you can create a decent Table of Contents that will integrate well. I won’t say that it isn’t time consuming to spend those few hours figuring it out, or that you won’t scratch your head for a minute or two. I am saying that once you put in that effort, you’ll find your finished product on Kindle to be well worth it.
Once you have a perfect ebook in Sigil, it’s easy to upload it to Kindle. Where you used to press that button to upload a Word file, you now simply go directly to Kindle to publish a title and upload the epub instead. Once that is done, Kindle will convert the file to Mobi, their own version of epub. You’ll find your Sigil conversion much truer to its original format than what you used to upload. The bullets won’t shrink; the headings won’t jump to another location, etc.
After you’ve uploaded, carefully review the Kindle preview version of your book. Try different formats. I downloaded the free previewer from the Kindle site to my computer, so I am able to preview my ebooks during the writing stage. I preview every so often as I’m working in Sigil. Once I like what I see, I publish it on the Kindle website.
While I review my work in the Kindle previewer, I often change devices at the top of the reviewer, so that I’ll know how the book looks on different devices. With the option to change views, you can see what your book looks like on an old Kindle, new Kindle, Kindle Fire, DX Widescreen, and more. By checking all of these options, you’ll see exactly what your customers will see when they download your book to their device.
Repeat the mantra: Free is good. There’s no need to spend money on an ebook editor. If you’ve been disappointed with your ebooks in the past, rather than hand the job over to someone else or buy a fancy program, just take a day out to teach yourself how to use one of the free epub editing programs, and you’ll be in business for the rest of your life.
Find Kathleen on the Arizona Authors website HERE
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