A Guide to Making Ebooks
By Alan Good
There are small presses that aren’t putting out ebook versions of their titles. In fact we were one of them. I’m trying to rectify that now, going back and creating ebook files for our older titles and making sure to create ebooks of the many great titles we’re currently working on. Ebooks are essential. First off, people need them. People who use screen readers need them. People who can’t pay $17 for a paperback need them. People who live outside your regular shipping range need them.
So do it. Here’s how. Sidenote: If your book isn’t ridiculously complicated I’d probably be willing to do the conversion for you for a little bit of cash (contact below).
Now you can always pay Ingram or Bowker or whoever to have it done but if you don’t want to/can’t this method will get you a file you can upload to IngramSpark (they require an ePub for ebooks). I don’t mess with Amazon anymore; the last time I did all they actually needed was a Word file. There’s an advantage in having your ebook on the Amazon platform, in that it could potentially earn you exposure. Theoretically. But Amazon takes a massive cut, and you do you but I don’t want to make money for that company. Note: every Malarkey author has the option to put their books up in KDP on their own and keep 100% of the royalties from that avenue.
You don’t really need Amazon though. We don’t have to be dependent on them. You might be able to sell ePub files (and mobi files for Kindle users) on your own website. We use Squarespace for Malarkey and we now have a digital store where we sell PDFs, ePubs, and mobi ebooks. I use wordpress for the Death of Print website (where I put out my own and occasionally others books); I really have nothing nice to say about wordpress and it wasn’t a surprise when I learned that site couldn’t handle mobi or ePubs. So I went around it and set up a Gumroad store. Gumroad does take a percentage, but a much smaller one than KDP. A nice thing on Gumroad is you can easily set a sliding scale on pricing. We have to pay for the Malarkey website, but we had to do that anyway, and if someone buys a $3 ebook off our website, that’s $1.50 to our budget and $1.50 that goes back to the author. (Depending on the title, that is; we pay up front for anthologies and King Ludd’s Rag, so that’s 100% of the sale back into our budget, to put toward books, book covers, paying writers, or even, God forbid, paying ourselves.)
Okay, this is my ebook method, based on tips from the smash words bible, various online articles, and my own trial and error:
Once all editing/proofreading is done, create a separate Word file clearly named so you know it’s for the ebook. I just call mine Such and Such Ebook Master. This is important: you are not typesetting here. All the painstaking formatting you put in the print version is basically pointless in the ebook. The text just flows based on the screen/device, so you want to keep formatting simple.
You can just use a standard page size, like 8.5x11. We’re not making a physical book here. Page size doesn’t matter because there’s no actual page.
Set your margins around .5 top and bottom, .8 left and right.
Delete all page numbers and headers. These things will get all messed up when the text starts moving around. Remember: We’re not making a physical book here!
Use page breaks between sections. Don’t do a bunch of hard returns to create white space.
I learned this the hard way: use # or *** to designate section breaks. If you try to use a symbol or image it can create a massive headache. Save the fancy stuff for the print book.
Ignore your inner typesetter and use Times New Roman font, 11 or 12. I’ll put on 14 or 15 point leading, but really you could also do 1.15 or 1.5 line spacing. We’re not making a physical book!
Align left. Don’t justify the text. We’re creating a reflowable ebook, meaning the text moves around based on the size of the reader’s screen. So justified text will just mess up your text.
Here is the hardest part: you need to create a linked table of context. This allows the reader to click on a specific line in the table of contents and go immediately to that section in the ebook. With the click of a back arrow they can move back from there to the table of contents. Here’s how I do it: create an anchor at every new chapter. Like if your book has Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc., go to the page where Chapter 1 starts, highlight “Chapter 1,” select Insert, click bookmark. There’ll be a space for you to name your bookmark; type “chapter1” (or whatever you want your bookmark to be). You can’t put any spaces. When that’s done, click “Add,” and your bookmark will show up in a list of bookmarks, and that list will grow each time you add a new bookmark. Go through the manuscript and insert an anchor at every new chapter heading. If it’s a short story collection or poetry collection or whatever, go through and set an anchor on the title of each new poem/essay/story/whatever. When you get through the book and to the acknowledgments or about the author pages, if you have those, set anchors there as well. When the anchors are all in place, go back to the table of content. This is where you connect the items in the TOC to their sections in the book. So highlight chapter 1 in the TOC, select insert, and select “Hyperlink.” You want to make sure this hyperlink takes you to a spot in the book, not the internet, so make sure you select “Document” on the screen that comes up. You should see a button that says “Locate” next to Anchor (there might be a search bar there, and you can type in the anchor as an alternative to clicking “Locate”). Your list of bookmarks will appear, and now you just have to select the correct bookmark. Do this for each item in the Table of Contents and eventually you will have an organized, clickable table of contents. It’s tedious but important for the readers.
If you want your ebook to have hyperlinks that do go the web, to direct them to the website of your cover artist, to direct them to the place on your website where you sell additional ebooks, highlight the text you want to link, select insert, select hyperlink, and change from “Document” to “Web.” Then you can paste your url and click OK.
Before you move on, review your document and make sure everything looks okay.
For the next step, you need an ebook converter. I use Calibre. It’s free. Fairly simple. Download the software, open it up, upload your Word doc. Edit the metadata as necessary (upload the front cover, attribute an author, publisher, publication date, etc.). Once that’s done you click “Convert Books.” Within that view, double check the metadata, then where it says “Output format” select EPUB. Click OK and it converts your Word doc to an ePub. Note: You can convert to ePub from Word and google docs but every time I’ve tried the ePubs were garbage.
Once the conversion is finished you can open the ePub and view it on your screen. Review it closely, make sure it looks okay and there aren’t random gaps or wonky text. Go through he table of contents and verify your links go where they’re supposed to go. If you have web hyperlinks verify they open correctly.
For insurance, you can run your file through an ePub validator. I just use this one: https://www.ebookit.com/tools/bp/Bo/eBookIt/epub-validator.
Ideally you’ll get the notice that there are no errors. If there are errors, it can be kind of tricky but if you’ve got this far you should be able to figure it out. You’ll get a really computer-lingo-y readout that tells you what the problem is; you might be able to make it out or you might need to just put the error code in google and see what other people say because most likely you’re not the first person to have this problem, whatever it is.
If there are errors you’ll have to go back into your Word file to make corrections, then generate a new ePub.
You might nail it on the first go, you might need to make a few revisions. Eventually you’ll get there. It really helps to keep all your formatting as simple as possible and not use a bunch of special characters and symbols, because those can generate errors when you go to validate the ePub. You can sell an error-ridden ePub off your website, I guess, and it will probably be more or less readable, but you wouldn’t be able to upload it to IngramSpark.
Once you’re ePub is golden, go back to Calibre, and go through the convert files process again, but this time select MOBI instead of EPUB. This will give you a separate file that can be read on Kindle devices.
From here you can start sharing your files. Give them out to reviewers. Sell them on your website. If you’re a writer with a small press, your publisher should really be working with you on this; if they don’t put out ebooks, and you hold the rights to your ebook, you can ask us about poaching it. If we’re interested we would generate the ebook and split sales 50/50 paying out quarterly. Contact there is malarkeybooks@gmail.com.
Even better, just sell it yourself and keep 100% of the money.
Alan Good is the Print Editor for Malarkey Books, as well as the author of The War on Xmas, Mere Malarkey, and The Sun Still Shines on a Dog’s Ass.