The Latest » How To Self Publish A Book » Layout, Design, Publish, & Market Your Work

Introducing SPAB!

by Bryce Beattie Posted on September 29, 2011

A couple of weeks ago I posted a free self-publishing helper tool called Pandoc ePress over on one of my othr blogs. Anyway, I’ve been hard at work on another version, and now I have something that should be useful to any do-it-yourself self publishing author.

The program has been renamed Self Publish A Book.

Now it can generate the file you need to immediately publish at:

Amazon’s KDP
Barnes & Noble’s PubIt
Smashwords
Lulu
CreateSpace
UniBook

And I put the program page here on this site, because it thought it fit here better.

Again, go check it out and help me test it. Self Publish A Book

Posted in Text Layout | Tagged Freeware, Self Publish a Book, self publishing | Leave a comment

Design Ideas: 36 Bestselling Book Covers

by Bryce Beattie Posted on March 1, 2011

As you design your book cover, here’s a 36 current bestsellers to use as inspiration. Click on an image to get a large version. The books are listed at the bottom.

: Portrait of a female vampire

Cooking

Nonfiction

Business & Investing

Teen

Mystery / Thrillers

Fantasy / Sci-fi

Yes, these are affiliate links. Is that so wrong?

Posted in Cover Creation | Tagged covers, designs, ideas | 1 Comment

6 Tweets to Promote Your Online Fiction

by Bryce Beattie Posted on September 27, 2010

I’m just going to assume here that you post fiction on your blog, and that you want more exposure for it. With that extra exposure, hopefully you’ll sell more books. Here’s five ways to promote your fiction using Twitter.

Oh, wait, before we get down to brass tacks here, let me just make sure you’re starting from the right spot. You need a Twitter account, and you need to make sure it is public.

One more thing – if you are looking to use your fiction as a way to gain readers and hopefully fans, you are almost always best off writing a serial of some sort. The hope is that readers will come back to find out what happens next.

Tweet #1 – Five Second Fiction

This is where you tell a whole story in a single tweet. And you don’t even have a whole tweet to do it, because you have to put #5secfic in your tweet. I’m pretty sure you get bonus points for working a pun into the story.

So that fans can discover your *ahem* longer pieces, make sure you have a link to your website/blog in your twitter profile.

Examples

#5secfic Bubba put down the wrench and put the baggie in his pants, giving new meaning to the term “Plumber’s Crack.”

#5secfic If only Jim had at least sent flowers he would still have a windshield and all of his left shoes.

Tweet #2 – Pimp My Story

Every Saturday, kira at EpiGuide puts together a digest of recent releases in of web fiction serials. To participate use the hashtag #pimpmystory when tweeting about your latest chapter.

Example

The Journey of St. Laurent: In Chapter 38, it’s finally time for UFOs vs Survivalists. http://bit.ly/dqCuzM #pimpmystory

For the complete skinny on “Pimp My Story”, check out the official rules: http://www.epiguide.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14866

Tweet #3 – Tuesday Serial

This is another way to promote the most recent chapter in your online serial. To participate here, sometime during the week tweet about the latest installment of your epic alien romance story using the hashtag #TuesdaySerial, then on the next Tuesday, go visit http://tuesdayserial.com/?page_id=1527 and submit your entry following the instructions on that page.

Example (of the tweet)

The redone and expanded Chapter 38 of The Journey of St. Laurent is up http://bit.ly/dqCuzM #TuesdaySerial

For complete details, visit: http://tuesdayserial.com/?page_id=7

Tweet #4 – Friday Flash

Here’s what you do. You write & post a piece of flash fiction (about 1,000 words or less) then you tweet about it using #FridayFlash. You can also submit it to the weekly collector: http://www.jmstrother.com/tiki-view_tracker.php?trackerId=2 (just click “insert new item”)

Example:

#FridayFlash A New Year’s Revolution http://bit.ly/9uM7Fo

Tweet #5 – Web Fic Wednesday

This one is a little different. This is one you can’t do yourself. You have to write something good enough for somebody else to tweet about it. They just put the hashtag #WebFicWed and a link to your site or a page with some of your fiction.

Every week, the #WebFicWed links are digested and posted by JanOda on http://www.ergofiction.com

Don’t be lame and start a new twitter account just so you can suggest yourself. Seriously. Although, I think it would be fair to mention somewhere on your blog/website “If you like this fiction, please tweet me for #WebFicWed”. I guess I’m not so awesome, because nobody had ever tweeted me up for this.

Example:

Check out J. Dane Tyler for #WebFicWed. Great short horror stories. http://jdanetyler.wordpress.com

New! Tweet #6 – Very Short Story

Thanks to Anke for pointing this one out.

Just like #5secfic, except you use #vss.

Example:

Jon looked down to see the laundry gnome dancing in his washing machine and burning socks. He closed the lid and went back to bed. #vss

Bonus Tweets.

Here’s another few general use hashtags that readers search for when discovering new fiction. Just sprinkle them in whenever you tweet about your stories.

#webfiction

#weblit

#fiction

#nanofiction, #microfiction, #TwitFic – like unto #vss & #5secfic

Now stop reading this and go write some fiction.

Posted in Market | Tagged marketing, promotion, twitter | 12 Comments

E-Book Self-Publishing: Part 3

by Bryce Beattie Posted on September 11, 2010

Here is part 3 of J. Dane Tyler’s series. You can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. The original appeared on his whatnot blog, and appears here with his explicit permission.

If you get a minute, you should also go check out his produced ebooks:

A Fine Cast of Characters [Amazon]

A Fine Cast of Characters [SmashWords]

All right, in this section of the tutorial – which, among us geek-types who like to learn on the interwebz is known as a “tute” – we’re going to have to dig, and worse still, script. *Shudder*

What you’ve done so far, if you’ve followed all my steps to the letter, is to take your Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer document, strip out all the formatting (and I do mean ALL the formatting), and now you’ve got it back into a nice, handy little HTML template suitable for you to transform into a .prc file which is DTP- and Kindle-friendly and allows you to check out your creation with the Amazon Kindle Previewer software.

So you’ve got an HTML document with no formatting. Now what?

Put back what you lost

You lost a lot. If you’re anything like me, you use a fair amount of italics to emphasize certain words in your manuscript. Don’t do that. As much as you can avoid it, you should. As a writer, you should have a strong enough voice to where that kind of thing is rare and well-placed in your document. But whatever the case, be you heavy-handed or light-touched on formatting, whatever you had, you’ve lost. It’s gone. There’s nothing there but a plain ol’ text document with a few paragraph tags now.

So, I’m going to tell you how to add back italics. This will go for any other inline sort of formatting you did too – bold face, underlining, strikethrough, whatever. As long as it isn’t a title or heading, a footer or a block quote, it’s probably inline and this is how you have to put the formatting back.

Open your word processing document, NOT the HTML document. The one with either the .doc(x) or .odf file extension. Open it with whatever the native word processor is.
Now, go to the Edit menu and choose “Find”.
Locate the special or format location features on the “Find” dialog box.

From the special formatting selections, locate the selection for “Font” and choose the font and the type of formatting to locate. For instance, in the image below, the Find dialog is set to locate Times New Roman 12 point italic font.

Once you click OK on the setup you can have Word (and presumably Writer) locate the instances of italicized text in your manuscript. Presumably. I’ve never actually tried this, of course. Ahem.
When Word or Writer finds an instance of formatted text, you can locate it in your HTML document using the “Find” feature in either Notepad++ or your text editor (if it has one) to locate the same text in the HTML document.
When you’ve found the text to italicize, put an <em> before the text you want to italicize and a </em> after it. Note those differences! The one without the slash is called a start tag, and the one with the slash (and it’s a forward slash, leaning from lower left to upper right) is called an end tag. You need BOTH, or everything AFTER the <em> tag will be italicized in your manuscript. BE CAREFUL!
Okay, finished with that? Great! Now go back and do it for every other type of formatting you did.
Did you manage to use drop caps in your document? Well, while HTML and CSS (that’s Cascading Style Sheets to you an’ me) might be able to replicate that for you, the Kindle doesn’t show it. If you HAVE to use that technique, you have to make the initial cap a larger font face than the rest of the text. I kid you not, that’s the work-around.
Save your HTML document after EVERY CHANGE and check your progress by opening it in the web browser of choice for you. EVERY. CHANGE. NO. EXCEPTIONS.
Close the word processor document when you’re finished.

Now for the Rest of It

Okay, with that done, let’s go back and add your book title, chapter headings and any other subheadings you might like to add. Remember your book is going to need “front matter” too – this is the copyright statement at the beginning of the book, and you’re going to want a table of contents in there if you’re doing a book with, say, multiple stories. You know … like my eBook, f’rinstance.

So let’s format the title. First, you want to open the manuscript in Notepad++. If you’ve installed N++, you probably noticed it asked you if you wanted to add it as an option to your context menu. I find this extremely handy for this part. I right-click the HTML file and click on the Notepad++ option in the quick-menu that comes up. Bada-bing, it’s open in N++ ready to edit. It should automatically be opened with HTML as the language selected too.

When you copied everything from the KompoZer screen and pasted it into the <body> section of your HTML document, it presumably brought over the title and other information you had there as well. I, personally, leave all that out until it’s time to do this portion, but if it’s there, that’s fine too.

Find the book title if it’s there. In front of the first word (i.e., to the left in English-speaking, right-to-left reading countries), type the code <h1>. Note the angle brackets. That’s mandatory on all HTML code and you must use it with everything you do in HTML. This puts the Heading 1 or top-level heading format on the title. If you look at your nifty little template, you’ll see I did a tiny bit of CSS scripting for you. What happens to your title is, it becomes all uppercase, 24-point bold-face font and is centered on the document. When you save and reload the HTML document into your web browser, you’ll see this happen. Cool, no?

Now, after the last word of the title, put the end tag for the Heading 1 formatting, </h1>. This makes sure ALL the text in your manuscript isn’t transformed to a level-one heading.

There’s more. If you have a subtitle, you can use an h2-format heading by putting <h2> in front of the subtitle and an </h2> end tag after it. I have a special format set up for the author’s name too.

So find your name. The part where it says “by You” or whatever. And in front of that line, put <p class=”auth”>. Then, after your name, i.e., where you want the formatting to end, type </p>. Save your document, reload in the browser, check it out, be impressed.

Now, you can place your copyright front matter. Copy and paste it if it’s not in place, and if it is, put <p class="ctr"> in front of it and </p> at the end of it. And your front matter will be nicely centered on the screen for you. Voila! You’re finished with the front matter formatting.

A word about Amazon and Smashwords front matter – be especially careful not to include a statement like “printed in …” with your country of origin. It is NOT a printed book and this statement is meaningless. It will probably get you kicked off of Smashwords.com. Amazon doesn’t like it either. They both have very particular standards about their front matter, so research it carefully before you put one in place.

For my hierarchy of headings, I use this guide:

H1 headings: Book title only.
H2 headings: Story or chapter titles.
H3 headings: Section titles or chapters within shorter works included in anthology.

I don’t go below level three for myself. You can go down to H6, it’s up to you.

Locate your chapter divisions and make sure they are formatted correctly.

Now, let’s discuss the pages.

Pagination in HTML

There isn’t any. None. Zero. Here’s what you have to remember: this is one long document. On a web page, each page is a separate document. In a Kindle, that’s not possible, each eBook is all one document. But there are tricks you can use to keep some page breaks in place.

Microsoft Word creates this neat piece of code when I convert the document to an HTML file.

Now, I’m not sure what, if any, of that gobbledygook is of use to the browser, but I know I can create page breaks so that each story starts on a new page and each chapter does too, if you’re so inclined. But the idea is free-flowing text without margins and bottoms and tops. The Kindle likes this best and even does some formatting for us, all by its little lonesome.

The problem is that little ‘mso-special-character:’ part. The one I used on my hand-made book was similar, but cleaner:

Much simpler, yes? And no ‘mso-’ specific formatting, which is bad juju.

Table of Contents Crafting

Crafting a good, working table of contents isn’t easy. It’s pain-staking, in fact, and you can’t just let your word processor do it for you. At least, Smashwords hated that. So you have to build them by hand.

Open the HTML document in Notepad++ if it’s not already.
For each story or chapter (I’m going to call them chapters to save a little typing from here on out), you create an entry on a Table of Contents page. So, I put in a page break right after my front matter and dedication, if any.
At the top of the page type “Table of Contents” and apply an h2 formatting.
In the body of the page, add the name of the chapter, such as “Chapter One” or “Chapter 32” or whatever.
In front of each one, type the following code: <a href="#ChapterNum">. For “ChapterNum, of course, you use the actual digit. Or name, if you’re going with named chapters. At end of the chapter name, you type </a>. So, a complete entry is <a href="#Chapter01">Chapter 01</a>. And see the pound sign/hash mark/tic-tac-toe/whatever you want to call it thingy? That’s required before the chapter name or number. Won’t work without it.
Save your HTML document, but don’t bother loading into the browser yet; we’re only half finished with the ToC.

All right, what you just did is create a bunch of anchor tags, or hyperlinks, which we now have to assign targets for. You can click ‘em now, but nothing’s going to happen because they have no destinations to connect to. So let’s give them the targets.

“Target” is where the links take you. So, let’s finish them off.

Open the HTML document in Notepad++ if you closed it.
Go to the first chapter title in your book after the ToC. Chapter 01 or Prologue or whatever you called it.
Before the chapter title and either INSIDE or OUTSIDE the heading format tags (doesn’t matter), type the following tag: <a name="ChapterNum">. The ChapterNum is replaced with whatever you named your chapter and it must PRECISELY AND EXACTLY MATCH WHAT YOU TYPED IN THE TOC LINK. Otherwise, the link will not work, period. BE CAREFUL! So, a full entry would be: <a name="Chapter01">Chapter 01</a>.
Do this for all the chapters in your book. You can use the find and replace feature and just type in specific numbers if you want, but for named chapters or story anthologies like mine, this is a manual process.
Save the HTML document when you’re finished. Make SURE you get them all.
Open your HTML document in the browser and test each and every link. Every. One. No. Exceptions. Test. Re-test. Test again, then do it all over again. Close it, open it, save it, then test test test testtesttest! Test it, over and over! Get it?
Do they work? If yes, GREAT JOB! If not, don’t be bummed out. It’s probably a typo somewhere, and will be easy to fix. (Yeah, right.)

Okay, this is a lot. A LOT. But don’t worry, the hard part’s over. Now we have a hyperlinked, well-formatted HTML document and we can run it through a couple of crunches and get a new file type. We’re almost there!

Oh, and a cover image. We need a good cover image. We’ll talk about all those things next time.

Have fun, gang!

Posted in Text Layout | Tagged ebook, kindle, smashwords | 1 Comment

E-Book Self Publishing: Part 2

by Bryce Beattie Posted on September 9, 2010

Here is part 2 of J. Dane Tyler’s series. You can read Part 1 here. The original appeared on his whatnot blog, and appears here with his explicit permission.

If you get a minute, you should also go check out his produced ebooks:

A Fine Cast of Characters [Amazon]

A Fine Cast of Characters [SmashWords]

Welcome back, fellow eBooklets! …0r whatever we are. Today’s segment of my eBook publishing tutorial gets into the file conversion part of the process, which can be fun or really aggravating depending on your skill, patience and how well you follow instructions.

Let’s get to it then.

Open the File in the Word Processor

First, open the story or manuscript you’re going to convert in Microsoft Word or whatever word processor you’re using. If you’ve created a plain text file, you can skip this step and go on to the next portion of the tutorial. We’ll catch up.

Once the file’s open, you want to create an HTML file from your story which will be manipulated elsewhere. So go to the Save As feature of your chosen word processor and in the file type designator box, choose “HTML” for the file type.

Now save your story as an HTML document. When it’s finished, open your file explorer – My Computer or Windows Explorer for Windows; you weirdos using stuff other than Windows are on your own again.

The file should be named something you can easily recognize and remember. It will have an .htm or .html extension wherever you saved it. Now navigate to it with Windows Explorer.

Check Out the Ugliness

This is an optional step, but it gives you some idea of how bad word processing software is at generating good HTML code.

When you’re finished, you can open the file with your brand-spankin’ new Notepad++ text editor. If you didn’t download it, shame on you, lazy-butt. Open it in whatever plain-text editor you want. Not a word processor, though; that’s critical. If you DID download Notepad++, make sure you select HTML under the Language menu.

With the HTML version open in your text editor screen, you’re going to see a LOT of code you didn’t know was there. Matter of fact, it’s gonna be a hot mess.

Yikes! Look at that!

But don’t despair! We can get rid of almost all of that gobbledygook and clean this up jiffy-quick.

Cleaning It Up

Okay, now we’re going to clean up the HTML from this thing properly.

Open the file in its native software again – Word, Writer, whatever it was.
Hold the Ctrl key and press the A key (Ctrtl + A) to select all the text in your file.
Copy the text (Ctrl + C).
Close the word processor; click YES if prompted to make all the text available to other applications.
Open your text editor (Notepad, Notepad++, etc.).
Paste the text into the text editor (Ctrl + V). This eliminates all unnecessary formatting and word processor-specific coding. If you use Notepad++, check the Language menu to see it’s on Normal Text.

Okay, so you’ve got a nice clean document now. It has no formatting. What’s that you say? You had italics in some places, centered scene break markers, things like that? Too bad, Bucky. They’re all gone now. It might be in the HTML document you made, and it will still be in your original file, but it’s gone from this puppy now.

Some sites, like Smashwords, for instance, call this the “nuclear option”. This removes any and all formatting from your file. The curly quotes will still be there, pointed in the right direction, but pretty much anything else you added, like italics for emphasis or special formatting for chapter titles, things like that … gone. Zap. Pow. Bzz. Pbbt.

Getting It Laid Out

Once that’s done, you need to lay the text out in a way such that the HTML file will have paragraphs in it. If you don’t do this, you’re going to have one long, continuous paragraph. Or you’ll have a bunch of lines broken with line break tags, which might look okay or it might not, depending on how the reader sets the sizing for the text in their Kindle/eReader.

You need to make sure the device knows where to break paragraphs, so they don’t end up in the middle of a line somewhere. You also don’t want any other headaches associated with bad HTML coding. So let’s get this done.

I like to use KompoZer, the HTML editor, for this step. There is also a composer window as part of SeaMonkey, the Mozilla browser no one knows about, but … you know. If you didn’t download KompoZer, you’ll have to do this all by hand. Have fun. Remember, copy and paste is your friend.

Copy all the text from the text editor (Ctrl + A to select all, then Ctrl + C to copy).
Open KompoZer.
Paste the text into the design screen (Ctrl + V).
Go to the View menu, and choose HTML Tags view.
Select all the text on the screen (Ctrl + A).
On the Format menu, choose Paragraph, Paragraph.
Switch to the Source tab (at the bottom of the window).
Go to the Edit menu, choose Find and Replace.
In the Find box type <br>; leave Replace blank. Click Replace All.
When the search is finished, return to the top of the document and run it again. You should get a message saying it can’t find what you’re looking for.
Click the Design tab again; you should now have nicely formatted HTML paragraphs.
Click on the Source tab again and copy all the text from the edit screen (Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C).

The KompoZer Source tab should show something like this:

See the pretty paragraph tags (<p> and </p>)? You’re finished with KompoZer now, but leave it open, just in case of boo-boo later.

Okay, the next steps are pretty easy, and very straightforward, but crucial.

Putting It into a New HTML Document

Open Notepad++. In a blank document, go to the Language menu and choose HTML.

BE CAREFUL! Remember you have your entire story and your HTML code for paragraphs on your clipboard; DO NOT COPY ANYTHING! If you have to delete to correct a mistake, either double-click on the error and re-type, or use the backspace key to erase it. I REPEAT, DO NOT COPY OR CUT ANYTHING DURING THIS PROCESS!

Type the following text into the document, just like you see it:

Don’t worry about the little + and – signs on the far left; that’s a function of Notepad++ and you don’t have to type that part. Just the rest of it.

What you have now is a template you can use for all your Kindle-published stories and manuscripts. It will do all sorts of neat tricks; anything you tag with the HTML heading 1 tag will automatically be changed into all uppercase letters, with a font size of 24 points and be centered. All the h2 tags will be centered; all the paragraphs of the class “auth” will be centered, 10-point italic font; and so on. The Kindle Previewer software had no difficulty with this little style sheet added to the HTML document, but YMMV, so use this template at your own risk. You can eliminate everything between the head tags if you’re worried.

All right, with that done:

Open the Kindle Stories template you just made (if it’s not open).
Save the document with a new name.
Open a new tab in N++.
Paste the markup text from KompoZer (Ctrl + V).
Go to the top of the document (Ctrl + Home does this quickly).
Delete everything from the top of the document to your first paragraph tag (<p>). All this information is already in your template; you don’t need it.
Select all the remaining text (Ctrl + A) and copy it (Ctrl + C).
Switch to your Kindle Stories template.
Move the cursor between the two body tags (<body> and </body>).
Paste the text from the other tab into the template (Ctrl + V).
From the Languages menu, choose HTML.
Save the story in N++ with an .htm extension as file type HTML from the File, Save As menu. You can overwrite your existing HTML version of the story if you’d like.
Open the new HTML file from My Computer or Windows Explorer with an Internet browser. Or just double-click on it to have it open in your default browser.
Verify all the necessary formatting is in place — titles, subtitles, chapter names, italics, bold — all were removed and have to be put back manually.

Next time, we’ll do a little HTML markup to make your story pretty again. Hang in there gang, we’re almost finished. See you next time.

Posted in Text Layout | Tagged ebook, formatting, kindle, smashwords | 3 Comments

E-Book Self Publishing: Part 1 by J. Dane Tyler

by Bryce Beattie Posted on September 7, 2010

This article was written by J. Dane Tyler and originally appeared on one of his blogs. You should also check out his fiction blog.

This series reflects the path Dane took to self-publish his short story collection via the Kindle Store and SmashWords. You can check it out prove to yourself that he knows his stuff. (And of course read some good fiction)

A Fine Cast of Characters [Amazon]

A Fine Cast of Characters [SmashWords]

Thus begins my series of posts about how to self-publish an eBook on Amazon.com’s Kindle store and Smashwords.com. As I warned before, if this is not something you’re interested in, click away and I’ll see you when the series is over. I’m not sure how many parts this will run, though, so I hope at least some of you with stories you feel are entertaining and would be enjoyed by others but don’t think you have a market for them will stick around and consider this.

J. A. Konrath also suggested if you’ve got a manuscript which did its rounds – that is, you sent it out for representation and an agent didn’t pick it up or your agent sent it around and no publisher picked it up – you consider doing this with those as well. What have you got to lose? At the worst it languishes just like it is now. At best, you have an eBook bestseller on your hands and who knows what doors that will open.

I self-published my eBook for a number of reasons.

Short story markets are generally non-paying and take months and months to respond, in general, to submissions. Not all, but some. The benefit is a publishing credit, and you know what? I have those already from a non-fiction book. Why do I need them from non-paying markets?
My situation isn’t stable and my future’s a little rocky. I wanted to see results now.
I believe the buying public will let me know if story collections are still interesting or desired by the readers of the world.
EBooks are the way of the future. As many people as there are bellyaching about I’ll never give up books, I’ll never give up books, lots of figures show eBooks are currently outselling print books by a fair margin, which is only going to grow. Get with the program or be run over by it.
I can get 70% royalties with Amazon’s Kindle program. Try THAT with a mainstream publishing house. Go ‘head, I dare you.
My stories were already on my blog for free; why not try to make a little money from them?

I could keep going, but you get the point. All the money I’ve made so far is that much more money than I made with them by not publishing them on Amazon and Smashwords. I’m already ahead of the game. That’s why I did it, and it looks like I was right so far.

First things first: What you need

You’re going to need a few things, but you’ll already have most of them, and what you don’t have is free, so don’t freak. Just go get it.

A good text editor. Something like Notepad++ would be ideal, but you can use Notepad – which comes with Windows – if you’d like. If you’re not using a PC, or if you’re using a PC without Windows on it (AHEM, Bryce) [Note from Bryce: What? I use windows. I just don't use Word...], you’re on your own. But I think Notepad++ is multiplatform, so I use it and I’m going to assume you’re using it too for the rest of this tutorial series.
Amazon’s Kindle for PC or Kindle Previewer software. I prefer the latter, but I have both. I can’t speak for how Kindle for PC works; never used it. The previewer does everything I want it too. I need this; it’s the only way I can test the behavior of the file and get an idea about how it looks on a Kindle. You can’t skip this one; go get it from Amazon’s Kindle publishing page.
Microsoft Word, or something which can save as a Microsoft Word document, like OpenOffice Writer or such. Try to avoid Wordperfect; it does strange things and no one recommends it. Also Smashwords ONLY accepts Microsoft Word documents. Go figure.
Mobipocket Creator. This is the program which will transform your file into a Kindle-friendly format for you. This is completely optional; many, many people upload their HTML document straight to Amazon’s DTP (Digital Text Platform) and the conversion to the Kindle-native file format is done for them. No hassles, no hair-pulling, no cussing. What fun is that?
I like to use KompoZer – which is a free, multiplatform HTML editor (like a word processor for HTML) to do some of the heavy, repetitive lifting. It’s not necessary, but you’ll see why I use it when we get into the process.
Patience. Yep, you’re gonna need it. It’s gonna take a couple of days to get this right, but by the time you do, you’ll be a pro and can do it in your sleep.

Okay, once you’ve got all that stuff together, you’re going to need a story. Of course, that story should be imported or copied and pasted into Microsoft Word if you didn’t write it in Word. The part where you have a story, I’ll assume is done.

Next time, we’ll get to the nuts and bolts.

See ya then!

Posted in Text Layout | Tagged ebook, kindle, smashwords | 3 Comments

eBook Preparation for Kindle Store

by Bryce Beattie Posted on August 12, 2010

Uploading to the Kindle Store

*edit* Added info for page breaks and cover images

After you’ve set up your account at dtp.amazon.com, there are a couple of ways to prepare your ebook so that you can upload it. You can prepare and upload it in html, doc, prc, or one of the other accepted formats. I like to prep books in html and then upload to Amazon. I let them do the conversion to the Kindle’s format. So in this article I’m going to talk about preparing a book in zipped html. If you want even more control, you can produce a file in the Kindle-Friendly .prc format. My buddy Darcknyt has a tutorial for that.

Why HTML?

If you are going to publish your ebook directly to the Amazon Kindle Store, one way you can upload your ebook is in zipped HTML format. I like html because it is easy to work with and I understand it inside an out. Plus, it’s easy to test.

Basic Steps

export book to .html
clean up html using notepad++ (or any old text editor with a search and replace)
test in a browser.
put html file into a zip file (using windows archiver thingy or 7-zip)
Upload zipped html to dtp @ amazon.

1. Export

Exporting is easy. I use OpenOffice.org, so when I want an html version of my book, I just use File->Save As

then I select html from the Save as Type list in the file dialog.

Microsoft work handles it in a similar manner.

2. Clean Up

Word processors tend to put in a whole bunch of stuff into the html that doesn’t need to be there, and may very wel affect your formatting when you upload the book. So I open the file in my favorite text editor ( notepad++ ) and erase the crap.

The crap come in two forms: header crap and extra styling crap that is fed into the body of the work.

Header crap is easy to remove, just select it and delete it.

The extra styling crap I take care of using search and replace. In notepad++, you just hit Ctrl+H to open up the dialog.

In my OpenOffice.org exported html, I had just a couple of tags that extra crap thrown in.

<H1 CLASS="western" STYLE="page-break-before: always">
<P CLASS="first-paragraph" STYLE="margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0in">
<P CLASS="first-paragraph">
<P STYLE="font-weight: normal">

I used the find and replace to change them to (respectively)

<H1>
<P>
<P>
<P>

Also, if you have extra lines anywhere that look like:

<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>

<P></p>
<P></p>
<P></p>
<P></p>

make sure you remove them, too.

3. Test

Just close the text editor, then find the html file and double click it, or use file->open in your browser. Just scroll around and make sure things look ok.

4. Zip

You need to put the html in a zip file so that you can upload it to Amazon. Just put the .html file in it’s own directory, rename it to index.html (your windows may automatically handle the .html part), then right click the file and select Send To –> Compressed (zipped) folder.

You can now use the zipped html file.

5. Upload

As you are using the wizard on dtp.amazon.com to create your book, just select your shiny new zipped html file at the appropriate time.

Other Stuff

If you want to have a table of contents, here’s how you can easily add one in.

Open the html file in notepad++ (or your favorite text editor). After the title & copyright information, you add in an unordered list that looks like this:

<p>Table of Contents</p>
<ul>
	<li><a href="#ch_01">Chapter 1</a></li>
	<li><a href="#ch_02">Chapter 2</a></li>
	<li><a href="#whatever">Chapter Whatever</a></li>
</ul>

The hash mark “#” is important, but you can pretty much name your chapters anything you want after that.

Now you add anchors to your chapter headings like this:

<h2><a name="ch_01">Chapter 1</a></h2>
<p>It was a dark and stormy night...</p>
<p>...</p>
<h2><a name="ch_02">Chapter 2</a></h2>
<p>Her hair smelled of watermelons and rancid corn...</p>
<p>etc...</p>

Make sure you test the html file in your browser to make sure you’ve gotten the links right.

Page Breaks

If it’s important to you to have page breaks before each chapter (to make sure every chapter starts on the top of a page) you have two options.

Add in the special tag <mbp:pagebreak /> before each chapter heading.
modify the h1> (or h2> or b> or whatever) tags to be like this <h1 style=”page-break-before: always”>

Adding a Cover Image

Ok, here’s how to add an embedded cover image.

Make a cover .jpg image. For example, call it “cover.jpg”
Put the cover .jpg in the same directory as your .html file
Open the html file in your favorite text editor. Right after the <body> tag, add in the following line
<div id=”cover”><center><img src=”cover.jpg”></center></div>

then save the html file.
Now select both the cover and the html files in your file explorer and right click on one of them, then choose Send To -> compressed (zipped) archive from the menu as before. Both files will be included in the zip.
Upload your new cover-containing zipped html file to dtp.amazon.com. Amazon will grayscale and resize your cover for you.

Posted in Text Layout | Tagged formatting, html, kindle | 6 Comments

Privacy Policy

by Bryce Beattie Posted on August 12, 2010

The privacy of our visitors to HowToSelfPublishABook.org is important to us.

At HowToSelfPublishABook.org, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use and visit HowToSelfPublishABook.org, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.

Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.

Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.

We also use third party advertisements on HowToSelfPublishABook.org to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP , the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).

DoubleClick DART cookies
We also may use DART cookies for ad serving through Google’s DoubleClick, which places a cookie on your computer when you are browsing the web and visit a site using DoubleClick advertising (including some Google AdSense advertisements). This cookie is used to serve ads specific to you and your interests (”interest based targeting”). The ads served will be targeted based on your previous browsing history (For example, if you have been viewing sites about visiting Las Vegas, you may see Las Vegas hotel advertisements when viewing a non-related site, such as on a site about hockey). DART uses “non personally identifiable information”. It does NOT track personal information about you, such as your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers. You can opt-out of this ad serving on all sites using this advertising by visiting http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx

You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

Deleting cookies does not mean you are permanently opted out of any advertising program. Unless you have settings that disallow cookies, the next time you visit a site running the advertisements, a new cookie will be added.

AdSense Privacy Policy Provided by JenSense

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Thoughts on self-publishing an eBook.

by Bryce Beattie Posted on August 5, 2010

This post is random bits of information and thoughts about self-publishing an ebook, based off an online conversation I had with my buddy J. Dane Tyler.

There are two great places to distribute your book in electronic format.

If you are lazy and only want to choose one, choose smashwords. Smashwords not only sells ebooks from their own store, but they distribute to several other stores: Barnes & Noble, Sony eBook Store, KoBo, Amazon, and the Apple Store. Smashwords takes a 15% cut of your profits to distribute. That’s great for the stores you can’t get into by yourself, but hey, that’s like an extra dime for every sale if you set it up yourself. So, yes, you can get a higher royalty if you set up Amazon separately, but there’s no shame in only wanting to manage your ebook in one place.

Thoughts on formatting an HTML file.

Here’s the basic idea: use your word processor’s “export” or “Save As html” to get a basic html document.

Your word processor is almost certainly going to add in a bunch of html tags that you don’t want. To fix this, you need to get really familiar with your plain text editor’s “Find and Replace” function. If you only have notepad, I’d suggest downloading Notepad++. As you look at the text, it may have tags that look like this:

You may want to find and replace them down to <p>

You will also want to remove any extra line breaks. Because eBooks can end up on any number of eReaders, you don’t know how the extra lines are going to work out for you. Instead, you should just leave extra lines out.

Usually if there are css instructions in the <head> section, you can take them out.

Thoughts on formatting a .doc file (for smashwords)

To make your life easier, you may want to attempt the following.

Format your book in html. Make the formatting simple.
Save a copy of your html file, but with a .doc extension.
Open your new doc file in your word processor, make a change (add and erase a space or something.) and then save it.

The html file will have the crap screened out and Word and OpenOffice are smart enough to open a .htm file that has been renamed to .doc, but they will re save the file in the full .doc format.

Unless of course your original .doc already didn’t have any crazy formatting. If it already had minimal formatting, just upload it. No extra conversion crap necessary.

Thoughts on cover creation

Smashwords requires a at least a 900×600 image. Kindle wants one that is much bigger. From amazon’s help: “Image pixel dimensions of at least 1280 pixels on the longest side, 2560 or larger preferred.”

Cover page?

Don’t bother making it a separate page by adding in extra lines or anything. Just make it a section before the body of your text.

The book info section at the beginning of my book Oasis looks like this:

Oasis

by Bryce Beattie

Smashwords Edition

Published by Baby Katie Media, LLC at Smashwords

©2008 Bryce Beattie
Bountiful, Ut
http://www.StoryHack.com

For Aurora, who encourages me to write, even when it’s about zombies.

1: The Last Shift

I heard Donald running down the corridor calling my name, but I didn’t care. I just tightened the straps on my backpack kept walking toward the door. In fact, I sped up, hoping to get to the parking lot before he could…

For more information, check out:

The Smashwords Style Guide – the official resource for what to do when formatting your book.
Amazon’s Digital Text Publishing Forum

Posted in Cover Creation, Text Layout | 1 Comment

Creating a Cover for your CreateSpace book

by Bryce Beattie Posted on June 8, 2010

Note: lots of pictures here. It may take a minute to load.

The purpose of this tutorial is to help you create a simple yet attractive cover for your self published book. With just a little work, you can achieve much better results, or at least more of the results you want, than you can get with the automatic cover designer that CreateSpace offers.

Step 0: Get the stuff you need

Here’s the stuff you’re going to need for this tutorial.

A CreateSpace.com account.
A manuscript pdf (see my text formatting tutorial)
A big background image. Check out http://www.sxc.hu and http://www.morguefile.com. Both sites have plenty of images that you can use for. Be careful with the licenses of the pictures.
If you want cool fonts, you’ll have to find some that allow for commercial usage. I recommend http://www.fontsquirrel.com. It has many free fonts that can be used for commercial purposes.
Download & install OpenOffice.org and the Gimp. Both are Open Source and FREE.

Ok, now that you have everything you need, let’s get going.

Step 1: Start Your Project & Download your Cover Template

and then select “Paperback Book” from the list that appears.

Fill out all the information for your book.

And then click the save & continue button at the bottom.

Now you should be looking at the “physical properties” page.

This is why you should have a finished manuscript pdf – you need to know how many pages so that it can calculate the spine width of your book. Click “save & continue”.

Now you are to the “Add Files” screen. This is where you can download your cover template file. So, you know, download it.

Step 2: Make your cover.

I’m going to use a few features of the Gimp just to give you an idea of things you can do. I’m not claiming to be creating a lasting work of art.

Ok, so unzip your newly downloaded template.

Start up the Gimp.

Open the unzipped file that ends in “.png”

The filename is something like BookCover6X9_280.png

Now you can see the file open in the Gimp.

Hit Ctrl+Alt+O (that’s an O as in Open) or select File -> Open as Layers…

And navigate to / select the image that you will be using as the background, then click “Open”.

The picture will now open up as a layer.

The picture I imported is too small for the cover! SO I’ll need to resize it. To resize it, make sure the picture is selected in the Layers dialog. (One of Gimp’s weird floating windows.) Select the layer simple by clicking on it.

Once the layer is selected, select “Layer-> Scale Layer”

Then set the width or height and click “scale”.

I had to set my height to about 2800. You want to make sure that the red part of the layer below is covered up.

That brings up a good point, I think I need to talk about the Background “template” layer a little. Let’s bump it up so we can look at it better.

In the “Layers, Channels, Paths…” dialog, Select the “background” layer and then click the move layer up button.

Now you can see the template layer on top.

Now, the explanation:

The red zone is going to get cut off when the cover is printed.

The blue zone may get cut into a little, so it’s not safe to put important pictures or graphics there.

CreateSpace is going to superimpose the barcode over the ISBN area.

As you work, you may not always want to see that template layer. If you want to hide it, just click the little eyeball in the Layers dialog. It is useful to keep the template layer at the top so you can judge where you are putting things.

Okay, let’s add some text using the text tool. (circled) Once you select the text tool, you can adjust how the Gimp is going to render your text by playing with the options below. (see arrows)

So play with those options and then click on the main image window near where you want the title to go. Type in your title.

Now use the text tool to put in the rest of your horizontal text.

I have turned off the template layer for the moment so you can see better how it’s coming. Also at some point it might be nice to turn back on the template layer.

The text is still hard to read, so I’m going to create a new layer (click the button in the Layers dialog)

Then move the new layer down to just one spot above my background image. (Using the move layer down button again.)

Now use the rectangle select tool

To select an area behind the title. Just click and drag to create the selection.

Now change the foreground color to white.

Then click OK in the Change Foreground Color dialog.

Now select the bucket fill tool.

Then click in the selection you just made.

Now by making new selections, changing the foreground color, then using the bucket fill, I’m going to put a box behind all of the text I’ve created, as well as one for the spine.

Now I’m going to make the spine Text just the same as any other. Put it anywhere, we’ll move it in a second.

Now select the rotate tool.

And click on your spine text.

Enter 90 in for the angle then press enter then click rotate.

Now select the move tool.

Click on the spine text and drag it where it belongs. If you start dragging other stuff, you’ve not clicked right on the letters themselves. Just hit Ctrl + z to undo then try again.

Make a new layer and select white as the layer fill type. Then click OK.

Then move that layer down to the very bottom. Don’t ask me why we do it, but just know I do have a reason.

Now hide your template layer if it’s not hidden. (click the eye)

Select the layer with the colored in boxes, then change the layer mode to overlay.

Now make a duplicate of that layer by clicking the duplicate button.

Here’s my result:

Last thing for the cover.

Select the layer that has the title. From the file menu, click Filters –> Light and Shadow –> Drop Shadow

Set the Offset X & Y to 0, and set the blur radius to 40, then click Ok.

And just for fun I’ve used the File –> Open as Layers… again to import a picture of the author. Here’s with the template showing:

…and without:

Make sure that the template layer is no longer visible. Now click File –> Save As and save your work as MyCover.png or something else ending in .png. Select “Merge visible layers” from the dialog that pops up, then hit “save” on the next one. The Gimp will then grind away and save your image. Remember where you saved it.

Huzzah! Now your cover image is made! You can close the Gimp and move on the step 3.

Step 3: Make a pdf.

I’ve never figured out a good way to export from the gimp to a pdf, so this is my workaround.

Start OpenOffice.org Writer.

Go to Format –> Styles and Formatting or press F11

In the Styles and Formatting dialog, click the Page styles tab.

Then right click on the “Default” page style and select “Modify” from the menu that pops up.

On the “Page” tab of the Page Style dialog, change the width from 8.5 to 17 and set all the margins to 0. Then click OK

Now select Insert –> Picture –> From File from the menu bar.

And select the cover image you just made in the Gimp. Then click Open.

Your cover image should fill the whole page.

Now click the “Export to pdf” button.

In the dialog that pops up, choose a name and a place to save the pdf. Then click save.

You may get this warning (Just click OK if you do.):

You can close OpenOffice without saving, unless you really feel the need to save the cover document.

Open your newly made pdf in your favorite pdf viewer to make sure everything is all right.

Ok, now you have your print ready cover pdf and you are ready to upload it!

Step 4: Upload Cover pdf to CreateSpace

Go to CreateSpace.com and log in. Go to your “My Account” page. Click on the title of your book from the “My Products” list. IT should return you to where you left off before on the “Add Files” step of the “Title Setup.” Scroll down to where it says “Book Cover” And click “Upload a PDF”.

Click choose file then navigate to your freshly minted pdf file and click “Open”. The click “Upload”. Depending on your connection speed, it may take a bit to upload.

Once it says “Your upload was successful”, click close. Then click Save changes in the main window.

You are finished with your cover! You’ll just need to finish going through the CreateSpace publishing wizard, and order a proof copy of your book, then you’ll be good to go.

Good luck and let me know if there are any questions.

Posted in Cover Creation | Tagged cover, createspace, gimp, openoffice.org | 7 Comments

Cooking

Nonfiction

Business & Investing

Teen

Mystery / Thrillers

Fantasy / Sci-fi

Put back what you lost

Now for the Rest of It

Pagination in HTML

Table of Contents Crafting

Open the File in the Word Processor

Check Out the Ugliness

Cleaning It Up

Getting It Laid Out

Putting It into a New HTML Document

Uploading to the Kindle Store

Why HTML?

Basic Steps

1. Export

2. Clean Up

3. Test

4. Zip

5. Upload

Other Stuff

Table of Contents

Page Breaks

Adding a Cover Image

About Site