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About Sarah EttritchCanadian author Sarah Ettritch writes stories with strong female characters. She's the author of Threaded Through Time, The Rymellan Series, The Missing Comatose Woman, The Salbine Sisters, and The Atheist. Visit her at sarahettritch.com.
Hi Sarah,
Thank you so much for your detailed information. I am following through with your suggestion to use Paul Salvette’s ebook. I’ve done everything to format for Smashwords, but I need a book cover–here’s to hopeful conclusions/beginnings. I emailed Karen Woodward, fellow blogger and ebook author, and she, too was most helpful. Truly, a kind community of folks helping each other. My First Day is starting with an extra warmth of heart. —Barb–
I’m glad you found the information useful, Barb. I agree–the self-publishing community is a generous and supportive one. I could never have published my first book without the advice and tips offered by experienced self-publishers.
If you haven’t found anyone to do your cover yet, you might want consider Patty Henderson. I use her for my covers. You can reach her through her website at http://boulevardphotografica.yolasite.com.
Thanks for the nice write-up, and I’m glad you found my scribblings useful. Please let me know if you have any questions about eBook formatting.
My pleasure, Paul. Your book is so comprehensive that I couldn’t resist telling others about it!
Hi Sarah, thanks for your piece. It was really interesting. Just letting you know about a friend of mines blog. Despite being a best selling author in the UK she has decided to self publish her book as an e-book in the US. Anyway, she’s blogging about her experience of the whole thing and I thought you, or your readers may be interested. The blog is http://www.michelegormanwriter.blogspot.com. I think writers like this are changing the game.
Best Peter.
Thanks for letting us know, Peter.
I recently finished my first book, the “No-Carb Revolution”. I am already selling it as a pdf on my own site (check it out here: http://www.NoCarb-Revolution.com) but I also want to put a version on Amazon.
I came across a $97 product called ePubTemplates that says it will do all the conversion for me, but before I could get it I stumbled upon your delightful site which is telling me that for the price of a $2.99 ebook on Amazon by Paul Salvette and the FREE program Calibre that I will have everything I need to convert my book to the Kindle!
There’s gotta be a catch somewhere, right?! It can’t be this easy, lulz!
Thank you so much for your help in this area!
Nope, no catch. I use a free program called eCub to convert my files to MOBI (Kindle) and ePub formats, but it requires some knowledge of CSS/XHTML to tweak the output. Paul’s book guides you through the process of preparing your files for Calibre, which is another common way of doing it.
If you decide you need a paid tool, I’d check out Jutoh. It’s a spiffier version of eCub that doesn’t require any CSS/XHTML knowledge, and it’s only $39 USD.
I like writing, and have a tremendous library of documents on my computer. That said, I like reading on my Kindle, especially at night. Right after I got it, I wanted to be able to move documents over and read them, then I found that it wasn’t as easy as it first sounds.
That said, I did figure out a rather efficient process to do ‘all the above’, and it actually is free to do. First off, if you have WORD documents, then you can format the document to actually fit and display properly on a Kindle. Change your ‘paper size’ settings to A5 (instead of letter), then set your margins at .13 for top and sides, and .5 for bottom. This will give you a good presentation.
Now that you have it formatted to size, you can use a very nice ‘total solution’ program to manage your Kindle, that can also convert WORD documents to MOBI format, that being Calibri. Calibri is free to download and use, and works great not only to manage your library (while not messing with your online Amazon library), and it also allows for online subscriptions of newspapers and journals, as well. It can also convert documents, albeit rudimentary, if you only have the right format…it comes out quite well.
If you don’t want to dump a lot of money into making document reading on Kindle possible…this is the ‘free-est’ it can get.
It sounds like you have a great system worked out for converting documents that you want to read on your Kindle. Thanks for sharing it.
(Did you mean Calibre, rather than Calibri? I can’t find a tool called Calibri that does what you’ve described.)