A book cover for an e-book is very demanding because it has to look great at full resolution but also look good as a thumbnail. Bruce was clever enough to figure out how to render the title and my name so that even at the tiniest scale, they were still readable.
Next you had to go through the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb and remove every extra tab, space, carriage return and so forth. Word has this little paragraph mark which lets you see non-printing characters and it was tedious but doable.
Next was the formatting so that when you publish, there is a built-in table of contents and hyperlinks that go to the proper spots. I save the book as a filtered HTML page then import it into Calibre for converting to an Epub. Then I convert the Epub to MOBI which is the native format for Amazon. I used the Kindle Previewer for that. If I converted it directly into MOBI, you don't get the nice table of contents.
In comparison, B&N Pubit, now called NookPress.com, was a dream. I could submit the Epub directly and it only took a few minutes to post. Once again, you have to use their previewer and revise and go back and resubmit but finally that was done.
Tomorrow, iTunes. What a nightmare!
Entry 1-143: May 17, 2013
(Trying to) Publish in iTunes
After I successfully published Rome's Revolution on Amazon and for the Nook, it was time to take on the iTunes store. Do you think you can just upload your book like the other two web sites. Nope. You need a Mac, which I don't have (thank you Steve!) and iTunes Producer. It took us two weekends and lots of error messages before I discovered that my books didn't pass Epubcheck which is the industry standard.
I went back and used a program called Sigil to examine the internal structure of the Epub format and discovered that Calibre was inserting some tags which were not legal. Sigil would allow me to manually remove them but I wasn't about to do that for every chapter every time I revised the manuscript. So I cheated. I wrote a program in Visual FoxPro which read in the entire HTML version, stripped out the illegal tags and then wrote it back to disk. By using the Epubcheck, I knew the next time I submitted my book to iTunes, it would pass.
One more weekend and voila, it went up. I got a rip-roaring big warning from Apple that my cover was not big enough (it was 800 x 600). However, it was just a warning so I ignored it. I wasn't planning on using that cover for the paperback anyway. Once the book went live on iTunes, it was time for Kobo. Kobo is a snap. It takes an Epub directly. Easy Peasy.
Tomorrow, how to (not) do a paperback.
Entry 1-144: May 18, 2013
Publishing in paperback
Publishing a book as an e-book is very satisfying but is a book really a book if it isn't a book? I set about learning what used to be known as vanity press publishing but is now called simply self-publishing.
The simplest, best alternative is CreateSpace which is owned by Amazon. You can't beat the deal. The whole process is free and when you are done, they list the book on Amazon for you. If you pay a little more, they submit it to Ingram, one of the world's largest book distributors, and now scores of people (and bookstores) are selling my books.
The only catch? It is called POD or Print On Demand. Which means nobody can put them on their shelves because they are only printed when ordered. No big deal right now. Maybe tomorrow.
Anyway, CreateSpace walks you through the process, complete with proper Word formatting guidelines. The only tricky part was the cover. Here are the covers that Bruce created. They are awesome!