Self Publish A Book!

What is SPAB!?

SPAB! stands for Self Publish A Book! It’s a simple piece of software that takes easily-formatted text files and creates all the formats you need when you are self-publishing a book. It makes an epub that you can upload to Barnes & Noble’s PubIt program. It makes a .mobi that you can upload to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. It makes a .doc file that you can upload to smashwords, which distributes all over the place. Also, It makes a pdf that you can upload to your favorite POD publisher like CreateSpace, LuLu, or UniBook. This pdf is made for a 5.5×8.5 inch book.

SPAB! doesn’t actually do all the hard work, though. It automates and optimizes several freely-available programs, so you’ll you’ll have to install them first.

Download

SPAB Version 2. Installer Download (Windows only) ~ 430kb

Installation

1. Install the required software.Okay, for all the features to work, you need to download and install 3 programs besides SPAB.
   • OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice
   • Pandoc (download page, get the Windows Installer exe)
   • kindlegen
2. Add Programs to the Path. Pandoc does this automatically, but you’ll have to do it yourself for the other two. You need to add OpenOffice’s program directory to the path and whatever directory that contains your unzipped kindlegen.exe file. If you’ve never added something to the path before, here’s a tutorial. Here’s another. And another (for XP).The directories you will need to add will probably be like: c:\Program Files(x86)\LibreOffice 3.4\program and c:\kindlegen
3. Download & Run the SPAB Installer.

Usage

This part is easy.

1. Start up SPAB. You may need to run it “as an administrator.” On windows 7, to do this, right click the SPAB shortcut and select” properties”. Then select the “compatibility” tab. Down where it says “Privilege Level” check the box that says “Run this program as administer” then click the “OK” button.
2. Select your master file. This is a special plain text file that has the content of your book. See the section below for info on formatting this file.
3. Select your cover file. If you have one. Don’t make it too huge.
4. Press the big “Publish” button.

Formatting a Text File For SPAB

As you make your text file, you’ll be using a subset of Markdown. For complete instructions of how to format your master file, go visit Pandoc’s User guide and scroll down to “Pandoc’s markdown.”

However, the following example should include pretty much everything you’ll need to know. If this were your book, you’d just save the following as a plain text file.

% Book Title
% Author Name
% copyright 2011 Author Name

# Chapter Title

Chapter text here. You must put two lines for the program
to recognize a new paragraph. If there are is just a single
line break, like there is in this paragraph, the text will be
treated as a single paragraph.

Just like this. If you want something in italics, you put splats around it *like this*. If you want to call them asterisks, that’s your prerogative. If you want
something bold, you put two asterisks around it **like this**.

If you have a block quote, you can do that by putting a greater than symbol before your paragraph.

> This is an example of a block quote.

# Chapter The Second

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

That may seem kind of like a lot of work, but going from a word processing document to this type of plain text file is simple.

1. Add the header information. That’s the lines that start with the percent symbol (%).
2. Add a pound sign (#) before each of your chapter headings.
3. Surround any italicized text with splat symbols (*). *Like this* You can call them asterisks if you must.
4. Surround any bolded text with double splat symbols (**). **Like this**
5. Use your word processor’s “Save As” function and mast the filetype plain text.

I intend to do a real tutorial on this someday, as this is probably the hardest part of the process. Just a tip, you should get to know the advanced features of your word processor’s “Find & Replace” function to automate the process.

Example

Here’s an example book you can run through SPAB to test it all out if you desire. It is a Mark Twain short story titled “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.”

Inputs

1. hadleyburg.txt This is the master file.
2. hadleyburg_cover.jpg This is the cover image.

Outputs

1. hadleyburg.epub
2. hadleyburg.mobi
3. hadleyburg_paperback.odt - This is an intermediate file. If you don’t like all the formatting in the pdf version, you could use OpenOffice or LibreOffice to edit this file and then make a new pdf.
4. hadleyburg_paperback.pdf - The file that could be uploaded to your POD printer of choice.
5. hadleyburg_smashwords.odt - Intermediate file that is used to generate the .doc file that you can upload to smashwords.
6. hadleyburg_smahwords.doc – Can be uploaded directly to Smashwords.

History

version 2 (9/29/2011)

• name change to Self Publish a Book!
• Smashwords .doc output
• pdf for POD publishing output
• tweaked the styling for epub & mobi output.
• simplified the interface

version 1 (9/13/2011)

• initial release
• epub & mobi output