Re: ePub creation for iBooks

I'm on another private email list (one for professional writers and some
publishing people and designed for discussion of any topic relating to
writing and publishing) with the author Michael Stackpole. Stackpole has
been doing self-publishing of e-book editions for many of his titles,
posting them on his own website and releasing them as, among other things,
Kindle titles. He has also blogged on his own site about his experiences and
ideas and about the necessity for writers to be prepared to do it themselves
and how to go about it. His website is http://www.stormwolf.com/

I've excerpted some posts below from recent discussions which may point you
to a solution (sections divided by "--"):
--
Just for informational purposes:

I did the conversion of a 178,000 word novel of mine, Talion: Revenant, into
a Kindle edition (and epub). I started from a scan of the book (an HTML file
a pirate had actually made my book into). That saved me scanning and a lot
of proofing. Because the pirate did not put italics into the HTML file, I
had to go through the book page by page to do that. Then I formatted the
book and got a friend to do me a cover (I paid $17 for the graphics used).

Total time investment was 8 hours.

The software I used is Legendmaker, which will go on sale soon enough. It's
for the Mac, and I'll pass on details when it goes live. It was created by
Michael Zapp, the developer who I worked with to get stuff into the
appstore. It takes the file, creates an epub and Kindle version in one
smooth operation. It'll be $100 or so when he releases it, and a bargain
compared to Adobe InDesign (and much easier to use than the free converters
I've tried).

Finding pirated versions of most books and ripping the text back out of them
is fairly easy, though that often does require the reformatting stuff I had
to do in this case, too.
--
I don't want to lead you astray. The 8 hours was mostly cleaning up the
text, putting in italics (since the pirate hadn't bothered to do that) and
checking the spelling. The actual time it took to add the tags at chapter
breaks and a little illustration at the three line breaks was thirty
minutes. That 30 minutes is the prep work you'd have to do for Michael Zapp
to do the conversion for $10.

But, the nice thing is, that working with Michael Zapp or his program, you
don't need to learn any HTML. His program does it all for you. :)
--
It works from .doc files or .rtf files.
--
The software I've been using to make epub and Kindle versions of my books
has now been released.

Hit http://www.zapptek.com/legendmaker/

to check it out.
--
--
The following excerpt is from another writer on the list:
--
Okay, a question: I've downloaded the demo version of Legendmaker and after
reading the help section, see that it's probably not beyond my very limited
technical abilities to learn how to use. (It looks easy enough for even a
techno-rube like me to figure out, and the how-to help file is both funny
and well-done.)

As I see it, this program would give me the raw file which I can then market
as I am able.

How does this compare vis a vis going through somebody like SmashWords,
which makes the book available to a bunch of places? The conversion process
is different -- SmashWords wants to run it through their converter
(Meatgrinder?) and you have to start with a Word file.

Amazon.com has its own convertor and it seems to be hit and miss. I've
managed to get books up there, but I don't have a clue what they look like
in various readers that I don't own.

For Amazon.com, I don't need an ISBN, but for iPad/iTunes, I do, and I can't
go directly to them, so I have to get there via some jobber.

(I've got a POD title at Lulu.com and it hasn't sold enough copies to pay
for dinner at a so-so restaurant -- I've sold more PDFs of that one off my
website, so I'm not sure how Lulu.com stacks up here.)

Obviously I'd like to reach as large a potential audience as I can, and for
the least amount of work and upfront cost as possible. Any thoughts on how
best to manage those?
--
--
No useful answers to that last set of questions have yet been posted.

The company I freelance for, E-Reads, has been doing most of its e-book
conversions via a couple of different service organizations and paying
substantially for the process. We've purchased a copy of LegendMaker (price
is $100.00) and we've been happy with the preliminary results. It looks like
we'll be able to do our own file conversions from now on and save some money
in the process. This is particularly useful since we had been having some
problems with authenticating older EPUB files and the software can be used
to clean up that issue.

As always, the warning: Your Mileage May Vary. However, this looks like a
good choice for us.

You'll note that there's an alternative approach mentioned in passing in
which you can pay the programmer $10 to deliver a conversion on a file that
you supply. If all you have to deal with is a single book, this is probably
your best choice.

Hope this helps.

John Douglas

John R. Douglas
johnd16555_at_gmail.com
New York, NY
--
Acquisitions Editor
E-Reads
171 E. 74th Street, Ste. 2
New York, NY 10021
Phone 212.772.7363
Fax 212.772.7393
www.ereads.com
[email protected]


On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 4:02 PM, fynydd_beirdd <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> I'm curious how many (if any) people here are having success formatting
> and creating ePub books that are acceptable for Apple aggregators.
>
> I'm struggling with consistently getting my ePub ebooks to meet the
> 1.0.5 standards. Yes, I know I can go to a service and have them do it
> but I'd really like to be able to do it myself if possible, as I have a
> number of titles. Money is not flowing freely.
>
> Any ideas? I've read a couple of blog posts on the issue, but they seem
> to be written for someone who is eager to delve into the guts of the
> epub document and make all sorts of changes using VI. I've used the
> 1.0.5 validator, and it gives me error messages and tells me that there
> are things wrong, but I have had a difficult time understanding (1) what
> the messages mean and (2) how to fix the problems.
>
> Tony
>
>  
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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