So You Want to Make An Ebook

[zvi]

Last year, Steven Saus, who is a digital first publisher and has done the e-book conversions for Jim Hines, among others, wrote a book about writing ebooks, which he published first on his blog and is now selling for $9.99.

The version on his blog is not really collated, it's under his ebooks tag, which includes a lot of other entries about the business of ebooks. So, I am collating here, in approximate order, his So You Want to Make an Ebook entries to date. (Since the original publication, he's added some entries for version 2.)

1. Introduction
2. Why Make an eBook
3. The Philosophy of eBooks
4. PDF versus eBooks
5. Brainware
6. Software
7. Converting The Text
8. Using SED
9. Creating the CSS Stylesheet
10. Using CSS instead of HTML
11. Inserting Images
12. Chapter Decisions
13. The Other Files
14. Checking Your Work

Bonus

• Business Principles
• Real-Life Conversion Problems
• eBook Covers

Addenda since publication

• Image tip
• You're Always Learning - eBook Tip (page anchors)
• Full Page Images
• Quick Access for HTML reference entities for ePub
• Special characters in URLs not always supported in eBooks

Comments

[annchi]

Whoa, this is great, and timely for me since I'm going to have do this or something similar with documentation at work. Thanks so much for posting it!

[ize]

Oh, this is great! Thank you for posting it.

[elf]

*looks around frantically for "kudos" button*

Thank you for this! This is a terrific collection.

Oh, wow, and a post about the "you must know these things" rather than just starting with here's the software and off we go to the CSS tips. Yay!

...I may be printing out portions of that "Brainware" post to shove down the throats of coworkers share at work.

[ilthit]

Very useful, thank you!

[kathryn_scannell]

You might also find this to check out:

http://www.ljcohen.net/downloads.html

Lisa Cohen has written a guide to all the stuff she learned in putting together her first self-published novel. It's short and sweet, but may be helpful getting started because she's not primarily a techie. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to find the guide, offered in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats.