Te Indie Author Journey

Mapping out your self-publishing adventure

with Carla King
EBOOK CREATION TOOLS ON THE DESKTOP
1
Friday, July 18, 14
Ebook creation tools on the desktop.
This segment of Mapping Out Your Self-Publishing Journey is all about ebook creation
tools on the desktop. I like to start with ebooks rst because theyre so easy, and
besides, a lot of the ebook creation tools can create print book formats, too.
These tools can be split into two categories: desktop tools and cloud-based tools. Today
were focusing on desktop tools.
Lets explore!
Friday, July 18, 14
What youll learn.

Why Ebook rst?

The tools: all of them!

Microsoft Word. Love it. Hate it.

Book Design Templates to the rescue!

Apple Pages, OpenOfce and NeoOfce.

Scrivener. My very favorite writing tool.

Blurb for highly-formatted color books.

Calibre and Sigil. Just a little too geeky.

Adobe InDesign. For professionals only.

A carpenter wouldnt hammer with a wrench, or saw a board with a nail le. Yet writers often do not
use the right tools for the job. Its really not our fault, our tools have evolved a lot. I still have my
grandfathers manual typewriter and my dads IBM Selectric but I write on a laptop with word
processing software. Now were expected to make the software we write with work for book
publishing, too. It may be time for an upgrade, as now there are better tools for writing and publishing.
This segment covers desktop tools you can use for writing and publishing. (The next segment covers
writing and publishing tools in the cloud.) Heres what youll learn today:
A NOTE ON THE LINKS
Some of the links in this document are
afliate links, which means I earn a small
percentage of sales if you make a
purchase after clicking on my link.
I want to assure you that I would never,
ever recommend a tool or service that I do
not use and love.
I not only use these products, I love love
love them and Ive also had great feedback
from other authors who love them, too.
Friday, July 18, 14
Why ebook rst?
I recommend creating your ebook rst for a number of reasons. Most importantly because simple ebooks
dont require a lot of formatting, you can easily make changes, and they are very shareable.
Why does shareable matter? Because, ideally, as you write your book you are also building your author
platform. A great way to build platform is to share your writing with potential beta readers on social sites
like Wattpad and Scribd. Really committed beta readers, aka fans, can help you with the developmental
editing part of the writing and editing process, too. We love fans!
You can also share your stories as an incentive to sign up for your email newsletter. Actually, this is your
single most important goal in marketing yourself as an author: to get readers to sign up for your email
newsletter. I suggest MailChimp because its easy, and free for up to 2000 subscribers.
Social sharing does not require ebook creation. Most of the time you merely need to paste text into a
eld in the browser. But its great to offer an ebook or booklet on your website.
Well address social publishing, marketing, promotion and author platform later. For now, lets focus on
book-building tools for the desktop.
Friday, July 18, 14
Te tools: all of them!
You may not have heard much about some of these word processing and ebook creation tools but I
hope youll consider using at least one of them besides Microsoft Word. Think of these tools as a
vehicle for your journey. You can take a car, a bus, a train, plane, bicycle, motorcycle or your own
two feet. Some are simple, some have lots of gears and controls. Here we go.
Friday, July 18, 14
Microsoft Word. Love it. Hate it!
Microsoft Word
You could use any text editor to write, but most authors use Microsoft Word and
hopefully youre using Microsoft Word Styles. Using styles is key to creating and
formatting a good clean ebook, not only in Word but in most of the other document
creation tools, too. I strongly suggest that you do a web search for Microsoft Word
Styles and learn to use them. Its fairly easy and it I guarantee youll save a lot of time
and energy in document and book formatting.
I must say that while Word isnt really the best tool for writing and exporting books it
is an important one. It was built way back in the beginnings of desktop publishing
with the single purpose of getting a document from your computer to the printer. As
it has evolved, Microsofts programmers have modied the code to offer advanced
features. This has unfortunately resulted in a lot of weird symbols being inserted in
web pages (youve seen them!) and in ebooks. The word processing software I
describe in the next pages outputs cleaner code.
EBOOK CREATION
ON THE DESKTOP
Microsoft Word
Book Design Templates
Apple Pages
OpenOfce
NeoOfce
Scrivener
Blurb
Calibre
Sigil
InDesign
Friday, July 18, 14
Book Design Templates to the rescue!
The Love Triangle of Ebook Creation and Distribution
Many publishing tools are built on Microsoft Word because its so popular. Smashwords and
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) are two important tools.
Smashwords is an ebook aggregator - which means they distribute your ebooks for you in
their store and to the online ebook retailers (plus app stores and libraries). KDP is Amazons
publishing tool used to upload your book to sell in the Amazon Kindle store. There are other
ebook aggregators but Smashwords and Amazon KDP is the most popular pairing for Do-It-
Yourselfers. (Amazon KDP is just a tool to get your Kindle book in the store.)
Think of Smashwords, Amazon KDP and Joel Friedlanders Book Design Templates as the love
triangle for ebook authors. When you create an ebook using one of Joel Friedlanders Book
Design Templates it is automagically formatted to the liking of of both Smashwords and
Amazon KDP. So create, upload and sell.
Did I mention that his cover design templates and print book templates are great, too? And
that they work with other ebook and print book services? Theyll save you a lot of time.
EBOOK CREATION
ON THE DESKTOP
Microsoft Word
Book Design Templates
Apple Pages
OpenOfce
NeoOfce
Scrivener
Blurb
Calibre
Sigil
InDesign
Friday, July 18, 14
Apple Pages, OpenOce and NeoOce.
Ill explain more about ebook aggregators and distribution in a later document,
but for now, lets get back to ebook creation tools.
Apple Pages
A lot of Apple users like Pages instead of Word. Its got most of the features you
see in Word but exports cleaner code. Pages uses styles too, and again, its in
your best interest to learn how to use them.
OpenOfce and NeoOfce
OpenOfce is the open-source alternative to Microsoft Word and does a much
better job of exporting clean ebook formats. NeoOfce is the improved version
of OpenOfce for the Mac operating system. Theyre both free, donation-funded
word-processing programs. And yes, they both also use styles!
EBOOK CREATION
ON THE DESKTOP
Microsoft Word
Book Design Templates
Apple Pages
OpenOfce
NeoOfce
Scrivener
Blurb
Calibre
Sigil
InDesign
Friday, July 18, 14
Scrivener. My very favorite writing tool.
Scrivener
Scrivener is an awesome alternative to any of the usual word processing programs
and in fact its my very favorite desktop tool. This is not only a desktop writing and
organization tool but it has an amazing feature set that can help you develop stories
and books. And guess what? It uses styles, too.
Scrivener can export your book (or just a segment) into print and ebook formats,
doc format for Word and the other word processing programs, and a selection of
other formats.
Scrivener is denitely worth the $45 (free 30-day trial) and the learning curve. I use
Scrivener to write almost everything now.
EBOOK CREATION
ON THE DESKTOP
Microsoft Word
Book Design Templates
Apple Pages
OpenOfce
NeoOfce
Scrivener
Blurb
Calibre
Sigil
InDesign
Friday, July 18, 14
Blurb for highly-formatted color books.
Blurb
If youre creating a full-color book or a book with lots of formatting, youll denitely
want to check out Blurbs easy-to-use tools for making ebooks and print books. Just
choose a template and insert images and words. If youre a pro designer or
photographer, take a look at Blurbs plugins for InDesign and LightRoom.
I recommend Blurbs BookWright tool most often because it builds a xed-format
EPUB version and a print version concurrently. This is a huge timesaver for authors
of highly-formatted color books.
Blurb also provides templates for trade paperback and other wordy books, but their
strength is high-quality color books and so their POD printing costs are high.
You can sell your book in Blurbs online store and they also offer distribution to a
growing distribution network.
EBOOK CREATION
ON THE DESKTOP
Microsoft Word
Book Design Templates
Apple Pages
OpenOfce
NeoOfce
Scrivener
Blurb
Calibre
Sigil
InDesign
Friday, July 18, 14
Calibre and Sigil. Just a little too geeky.
Calibre and Sigil
I wasnt going to mention Calibre and Silgil because theyre a little geeky for the
average self-publishing author they appear in search engines so often I thought
you might want to know something about them.
Calibre is an open source ebook creation tool that exports your book to all the
ebook formats. Sigil simply creates EPUBs.
I also want to mention that its possible to create a MOBI (for Kindle) from an
EPUB with other tools, including an online tool called EPUB2MOBI, but the end
result might not look very good. Actually, these days, its a better practice to
create Kindle Format 8 (KF8) les instead of MOBIs so it looks good on all Kindle
devices including the Kindle Fire tablet..
EBOOK CREATION
ON THE DESKTOP
Microsoft Word
Book Design Templates
Apple Pages
OpenOfce
NeoOfce
Scrivener
Blurb
Calibre
Sigil
InDesign
Friday, July 18, 14
InDesign. For professionals only.
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is a book design application and the de-facto standard used by
professional book designers. Its expensive, difcult to learn, and extremely exible,
giving the designer ultimate control over ebook and print book design, even
multimedia. Self-publishers like me had to learn InDesign before all the easy-to-use
solutions were developed. InDesign is part of the Adobe Creative Suite, which also
includes PhotoShop, Illustrator, and other applications pro designers are trained to
use. If you have a serious budget for your book and want a real pro to design it for
you, make sure the designer is using the latest version of InDesign.
Thats it!
But thats not all. There are some pretty awesome cloud-based tools you need to
know about before you make your nal decision.
EBOOK CREATION
ON THE DESKTOP
Microsoft Word
Book Design Templates
Apple Pages
OpenOfce
NeoOfce
Scrivener
Blurb
Calibre
Sigil
InDesign
Friday, July 18, 14
What youve learned.
Heres what youve learned in this segment:

10 important desktop tools that allow you to create ebooks.

Styles in Microsoft Word and their importance in document and ebook creation.
(Also in Pages, OpenOfce, NeoOfce, Scrivener, and others.)

A really great combination for ebook creation and distribution is the love triangle of
Smashwords, Amazon KDP and Joel Friedlanders Book Design Templates.

Scrivener is a superior desktop writing and book creation tool for its outlining, organization,
story development and export capabilities.

Blurb has some of the best desktop tools for creating complex, full-color ebooks, with their
BookWright tool in particular great for creating ebook and print book formats concurrently.

Whether you do it yourself or hire it out, I hope you are now well-versed in the lingua-
franca of desktop tools that help you to create ebooks.
Friday, July 18, 14
Intensify your learning
Following Carla King's advice is the smartest thing you can do as an indie author
because it will save you a boatload of grief and money. She looks closely at the latest,
greatest shiny objects in the path of authors to determine if they will help or hinder
their success. I trust her indisputable, good judgment and so should you".
- Robin Cutler, Manager of IngramSpark
What people are saying...
Intensify your learning with Virtual Self-Pub Boot Camp. Ive run this program in the San Francisco Bay Area for a few
years and now its gone virtual! Im offering recordings of the sessions from not just one, but two recent workshops
featuring experts from all walks of the self-publishing industry. It costs only $99 for over 10 hours of learning with
bonus presentations, plus access to membership in an online community that offers even more information and
training. Thats like getting a crack team of personal self-publishing consultants for less than $10 an hour! The
program includes audio-video presentations that you can watch or listen to on your mobile device, plus pdf slidesets,
all downloaded to your desktop to watch, listen, read anytime, anyplace. Here are some of the experts youll hear
from. Got questions? Please contact me.
Friday, July 18, 14
Over land and sea and all the strange creatures that be
I pledge to be your loyal guide in your indie author
journey. Please sign up for Te Indie Author Journey
news so I can let you know when theres more of
Mapping Out Your Self-Publishing Adventure,
and other information youll nd
useful on your journey. A heartfelt
thanks for allowing me to guide
your adventure!
click to email
Tanks for joining me!
Your loyal guide, Carla King
Next: Ebook creation tools in the cloud
Friday, July 18, 14