01 May 12 7:25 pm
Tips on creating ebooks and POD books
I got a private message asking about my methods in creating ebooks and referring to Amazon.
So, thought I'd share my response here for everyone. Here goes:
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I haven't sold on Amazon, but have helped clients self-publish with the "Createspace.com" service - which seems to be Amazon's self-publishing partner (though a separate company).
My understanding is that it’s up to you to properly format your ebook or POD (Print-On-Demand) book, as well as provide the cover/spline/backcover, all in ready-to-print condition. They don't do anything for you except print the book and provide reports of formatting problems, etc. for you to fix.
Use Microsoft Word to write and format your books. Createspace does provide Word templates for POD books, to get you started.
The big difference between ebook and POD book is that a POD printed book needs all the fancy "opposite pages" formatting for actually printing pages that are both left and right facing.
An ebook is just one huge "page" which the reader scrolls down through - kind of like a web page.
Yes, you should make a Table of Contents - Word makes it easy, if you do setup a custom hierarchy of headers for it to use – which you should always have in any book. You know, like:
Chapter Title (centered)
Section Title (centered)
Header 1 (left)
Header 2 (left)
Header 3 (left)
...and like that
I use he latest MS-Word 2010, which has the ability to save as a PDF (so you don't need the expensive Adobe Acrobat or one of the imperfect cheap clones). If you set the right options when saving as PDF - you can even protect your PDF from editing - something my online research said was impossible, but does work for me. Use the 'Options" >"ISO 19005 (PDF/A)” checkbox. Also check the "Create bookmarks” and "Document structure” checkboxes.
To self-publish, you do have to get a bit proficient in using Word for page layout, modify styles, insert page breaks, insert pictures and edit them and more. I highly recommend Microsoft's free video tutorial on using Office and Word. These are great tutes and make the complexities of book creation easy to understand.
Office training videos. Of course you could hire a transcription service and record it all on audio for them, or use "Dragon Naturally Speaking" for voice-to-text, then heir a Word expert/editor to do the formatting and editing for you. But it's not that hard to learn to do yourself - all part of this game.
Microsoft Office tutorial videosHope this helps…
_jim coe
