Adventures in Indie #6: Self-made books
Originally published at J. Kathleen Cheney. You can comment here or there.
I talked a couple of weeks ago about using Canva to make covers for ‘promotional’ books. And generally to save costs on those books, I also format them myself.
Now, I have to say up front that my method of formatting is not the best. There are a lot of ways to format a book. Some people use Scrivener, which can put out a book in EPUB format. Personally, I found Scrivener too complicated, so I gave up on it after six months. I have a friend who uses InDesign, but when I did a trial of that, I found it WAY too complicated also.
So what are some of the options I’ve used?
Way back in 2011, I formatted my books using the guidelines that Smashwords recommended. This led to decent books, although nothing special.
But I wanted something a little better looking for this new generation of books.
So for The Dragon’s Child, I tried out a service called Pronoun. It basically takes your Word file and makes it into an ebook (but not a print book). They give you a choice of layouts (6 at the time that I used it), lay your document into that, and put it out as an epub and mobi. They will even upload it to all the vendors that way.
It’s a free service as well. (Here’s a pretty comprehensive review of the service). So far I’ve been pretty happy with the book they produced for me. However, it’s not available as a print book, something that I may work on this fall (see below.)
Since then, however, I’ve been working with a new program that I like pretty well to produce ebooks -and- print books.
My editor/formatter, Rick Fisher at EQP Books, turned me on to the program that he uses: Serif PagePlus 9. So far this program has been easy to learn and I’ve been super happy with the books that I’ve produced. (See Fleurs du Mal and A Time for Every Purpose, available as .pdf files on the bottom of my Free Fiction page.)
Again, I’m just producing my promotional books this way (because I want my editor to review my novels for me!), but that frees me from being tied to Pronoun’s placement restrictions, so I’m uploading them to Amazon and D2D myself.
The best thing for me about PagePlus is that it’s a fairly intuitive interface. Most of the menus have similar structure to Word, so that means that someone who uses Word all the time will find it easier to work with than, say, InDesign (which is an Adobe product). I can create .mobi, .epub, and .pdf files, and even used that .pdf function to create the cover for my print version of The Sparrow in Hiding. Really versatile.
Also, because it’s a legacy product, it’s inexpensive. I paid 24.99, rather than the new subscription services like Adobe. So I’m happy with it so far!
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