1st Time Ebook Publication

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walterwrite

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Hello all!

I'm assembling an e-book for my employer, my first one! I plan to do the design in Adobe InDesign CS6.

I've been researching the meat and potatoes of setting up the project to begin and have a few questions.

1. Is creating in InDesign with intent to export to epub format the best way to go about this? We plan to distribute through all the normal channels - Amazon, Apple, etc.

2. What are good dimensions for this project? I've read a lot of info saying that 8.5" x 11" in portrait ensures the best reflowability.

3. Lastly (for now), .doc format. Reading through many style guides (like Smashwords) says that design to .doc and then putting it through a meatgrinder is optimal. Thoughts?

All your help is greatly appreciated!
 
Old Hack

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I'm pretty sure that all your questions are answered in the many self-publishing diary threads, Walter.
 

Joe_Nobody

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My guys have never used InDesign, so no idea how to help you there.
For Amazon, B&N and KOBO, we upload the straight Word .docx file. Works well.
For SW, we use the same .docx with Smashwords version notice inserted.
For Apple, they use jutoh (free software) to create the .epub from the docx.
For Google, they save the .docx as a .pdf and upload that.
Good luck.
 

walterwrite

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Thanks very much Joe! I was looking forward to learning InDesign, but if Word is optimal I'll go with that.

Aside from the normal Googling, do you have any links you could provide so I can get the project started right?

Any tips anyone can give me are very helpful. I've browsed through the forum here but haven't really found any threads relevant to my situation.

Thanks so much all!
 
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Walter, go to the self publishing room. There's a sticky thread there which lists all the self publishing diary threads. They contain a lot of information which you might find useful.
 

J. Tanner

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1. I have InDesign, but I write in OpenOffice, export HTML, and then convert to MOBI and EPUB in Calibre. Both tools are free. (LibreOffice, Sigil and Scrivener are also tools that come highly recommended from others for these tasks. Word seems to do the worst job of the available tools, but it's still passable.)

2. Dimensions are irrelevant for an ebook. All data regarding page size will be (should be!) stripped out during the conversion process.

3. I found DOC to be sub-optimal for Smashwords back when it was the only choice. Now that they offer direct EPUB upload I did that with my recent release and find the results so much better. Meatgrinder is a huge compromise of quality for depth of obscure format support. It's too much compromise for me considering how small the SW sales are overall, and then that only a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage want something other than EPUB anyway.
 
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