HOW YOU CAN CREATE AN E-B00K:

As a writer, this has been my experience creating an e-book for Kindle (.mobi) and Sony e-readers
(.epub). I bought several books on how to create an e-book as well as consulting various sources on the
internet and here is a summary of the steps I took to create my e-book.

Programs I used:

 ADOBE INDESIGN
 SIGIL
 EPUBCHECK
 KINDLEGEN

Adobe InDesign – Creating the pages

First of all, I used Adobe CS5 InDesign, to create the pages. When you’re creating an e-book, it doesn’t
matter about page sizes or margins or page numbering or repeating headers. I started InDesign and
created a new document that was 5.5 inches by 7.5 inches. It’s a good idea to have a new document for
every chapter of your book.

I saved my first document, I created a ‘book’ file. In InDesign, document files are saved as .indd whereas
books are saved as .indb.

Each time you create a new document, be sure to add it to your ‘book’ by pressing the ‘+’ sign on the
bottom.
My book’s documents were in the following order:

 Cover.indd (an RGB jpeg image that was 650px wide by 950px high)*
 Title/Copyright page.indd
 Table of Contents page**
 The story in all its documents

*the minimum image size is 600 x 800 pixels. Any smaller and I discovered it will be rejected by
Amazon!

**The TOC (table of contents) page doesn’t include any page numbers, just the titles of your chapters or
stories. I tried to add links in InDesign but the program won’t export these to epub, so I did this
manually in Sigil with good results. See link here.

Next I figured out what types of styles to use:

1. Paragraph styles (use for chapter titles, paragraphs)

2. Character Styles (use for individual things like a single drop cap or an italicized word)

I assigned styles to all the headers and for most of the paragraphs a “Body” style was all I needed. I used
a couple of different paragraph styles for the different sized headers on my title page and that was
about it.

Originally, I was trying to be fancy by including drop caps on all the first paragraphs, but later I found this
is a royal pain in the neck and dropped the drop caps! If you’re super keen on including these, I suggest
checking out my references at the bottom.

I hit Ctrl+S many times!

Tweaking tips I learned:

1. The first thing I realized would help was to show all the hidden characters in each document I
was editing: Type > Show Hidden Characters

2. Deleted any extra paragraph marks that were used just to create extra space. Only one return
allowed!

3. Just to make sure everything is what I thought it should be, I went to Edit > Find/Change and
clicked on the Glyph tab to find out if there were any styles in the document that shouldn’t be
there. I did find some old unused styles, I think I must’ve changed my mid about something and
just pressed delete on any ones I wasn’t using. Also, while I was on the Find/Change selection, I
clicked on the tab marked GREP and looked for any tabs or other types of marks. all those
paragraph marks and other funny squiggles (by pressing the @ button you can get a complete
list)
The next thing I did was to make a navigational Table of Contents that e-books require. First, I found the
source document in the book (.indb) file. The source document is indicated by the shape in the box
adjacent to the title.

Open the source document, then go to Layout > Table of Contents Styles > New

a. Give your TOC Style a unique name but leave ‘TOC’ in front

b. “Include Paragraph Styles” refers to the styles that you’re using for your titles in your
document – so if you named the style for your chapter headings as ‘Chapter’ you would
find the Style called ‘Chapter’ in the list on the right hand side and press the <<Add
button

c. Tick the box that says ‘Create PDF Bookmarks’ and ‘Include Book Documents’
 d. Page numbering doesn’t matter in e-books, so I didn’t bother to select this as an option
(not shown)

With the same ‘source’ document still open, I selected File > File Info and entered the metadata such as
the name of the book, author name, and keywords.

Once I was sure everything looked okay, I pressed select Export book to EPUB by clicking on the menu
box in the upper right hand corner of the book icon.

At this point I followed the instructions that Liz Castro has in her e-book with a couple of variations.
First, it asks you where to save the .epub file you are about to create, so go ahead and choose a location.
Then another screen pops up with three different selections: General, Images and Contents.

 Be sure to check ‘Include Document Metadata’ – this is what you filled out under File Info
(previously) and leave the Unique Identifier! At first I didn’t realize what it was and deleted it
thinking it wasn’t important…then I found out it is crucial!
The next item to deal with is ‘Images’ so click on that which will bring you to the next screen:

There are several choices for Images, but I chose JPEG with a high quality. The last tab is ‘Contents’
where I made the following selections:
  The TOC Style should be the one that you created earlier.
 For CSS Options, I only checked ‘Include Style Definitions’ – I did experiment with choosing the
other two but did not have good results so after re-doing this several times, I decided the safest
bet was to leave ‘Preserve Local Overrides’ and ‘Include Embeddable Fonts’ deselected.

After you’re done, press ‘Export’ and wait for InDesign to churn out your Epub book. It’s interesting to
note how InDesign converts the text into a file that can be read by epub e-readers.

Everything is placed in <div> tags:

 <div class = “generated style”>

Paragraph styles are converted to <p> elements with .class definitions

 <p class = “paragraph style”>

Character styles are converted to <span> elements

 <span class = “character style”>
Sigil – Editing the Epub files
Since InDesign doesn’t make a perfect conversion, I decided to download a free copy of Sigil
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ onto my desktop.

This is an open source program and it is a WSYIWIG (what you see is what you get) editor. For any
questions about downloading, they have a helpful Wiki tab. I run a Windows operating system so I
downloaded the zip file.

I opened up the program and then went File > Open and searched around for the epub file that I had
saved from InDesign.

Where to start? After reading Liz Castro’s book and a couple of other references, this is what I finally
learned:

1. Look for the CSS file that InDesign converted. It should be on your left hand side of the screen in
folder view and is called template.
a. Open it up in code < > view and look at the top of the file for any styles that are empty:
div.generated style { } - go ahead and delete these

2. Add Semantics:
a. Click on the Images folder, right click on the image you’re using for the cover and under
Semantics, click on this to indicate that this will be your cover image
b. Repeat the above steps and add semantics to:
i. Table of Contents page
ii. Copyright

Right click on
title in Book
Browser
window

3. Centre the cover image by changing the code as follows. Note: (replace titleofbook but keep the
quotes!)
<body>
<div>
<img src = “…..jpg” alt=”titleofbook”
 style=”max-width: 100%;” />
</div>
</body>
4. Add links to your Table of Contents file:

a. I opened up my first story Appraiser.xhtml, then switched to code view

b. Next, under the <body> tag I entered the following between the <p> and </p> tags:
i. <a id=”appraiser”></a>
c. I opened up Table of Contents.xhtml, switched to code view, found the <p> tags:
i. Right after the <p…>I typed: <a href=”Appraiser.xhtml#appraiser”>Costly
Appraisal</a> </p>
d. Repeat the process for all of your headings in your Table of Contents

I discovered that it is very important to make your id’s unique! See line 4b.i.

5. Make any styling adjustments by changing CSS template file. As an example, I found that the
Story titles weren’t as large as I had thought they would be, so with one of the files open, I made
adjustments to the CSS. Automatically, the changes were applied to the other files!

Checking the file for errors with Epubcheck:

Epubcheck is an open source program available at http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/ .

1. Be sure to download the latest version, as of this writing the version is 1.1 so in my case I would
download epubcheck-1.1.zip to my desktop.

2. I created a folder called Epubcheck, then I unzipped the file to this folder

3. I dragged the epub file I had been working on to the Epubcheck folder

4. Next, I clicked on Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt or Start > Run type cmd
then enter to get the old black DOS like screen

5. I typed: java –jar epubcheck-1.1.jar WaveOne.epub (to make it clear, there is a space after
“java”, a space after both “jars” and don’t forget the dot after each 1) press enter

6. Check for any error messages. The only error message I received one time was regarding two
id’s being the same. I went back to Sigil and opened it up and made a change to make the id
more unique. Epubcheck also has a good website with some helpful explanations of common
error messages.

Once you’re epub file is free of errors, you can view it in a free epub reader like Adobe Digital Editions at
http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/. Once I was satisfied with it, I decided I wanted to
sell a copy on Amazon, however, Amazon requires e-books to be in a .mobi format.
Converting your e-book for Amazon’s Kindle:

I tried to download Amazon’s tool to convert the InDesign file to a .mobi format but from what I read on
the internet, this process is still a bit precarious. Therefore, I decided to use Amazon’s tool called
KindleGen.

1. Download KindleGen by doing a search for Amazon Kindle’s Publishing Program or try
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621 Download the zip
file to your desktop.

2. Make up a file on your C: drive called KindleGen

3. Extract the zip file to C:\KindleGen

4. Copy the epub file you worked on to the KindleGen folder (above)

5. Open up a command window by clicking on Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command
Prompt or Start > Run type cmd then enter to get the old black DOS like screen

6. It doesn’t matter where the computer says it’s at, I just went ahead and typed:
C:\KindleGen\kindlegen C:\KindleGen\WaveOne.epub

7. It takes a couple of moments of whirring around before KindleGen converts your epub file to
mobi. Even if it doesn’t say whether there are any errors, be sure to view the file in the
Kindle Previewer (Start > All Programs > Amazon > Kindle Previewer)

Here are some useful references if you want more information and tips:
Liz Castro’s “EPUB – Straight to the Point” http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/

Making e-books from InDesign: http://www.creativepro.com/article/making-e-books-indesign-part-1

Best Practices in EPUB cover images: http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/20/best-practices-in-epub-

cover-images/

The epub blog: http://www.epubbooks.com/blog/

I hope you found this helpful…

Please come and visit my short story blog at http://www.oceanbluepress.com