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How to Make an e-Book for $0

After I finished writing my first book in August, I started looking into self-publishing as a means to get it out. I liked the concept better than “traditional” publishing because you retain your rights and have as much control over your product as you want. I say “traditional” because, interestingly, self-publishing is more like publishing in the 1600s and the publishing industry we know today is relatively new in the grand scheme. Anyway, I thought it would be cool to keep a blog of my self-publishing adventures from the beginning. A sort of live experiment to see what works and what fails hilariously.
One of the first things I noticed was that there were many parties offering to render services that, with a little patience and some free downloads, I could do myself for free. Thus, I now firmly believe that there is no reason to pay a cent if you want to publish an e-book.
After a long trial-and-error process, I was left with a simple system that I'll probably use again.
Here is what to do:
  1. Download (all free)

  2. Abandon Microsoft Word and do all writing/editing/formatting in OpenOffice Writer. Save it as an html document. If you are writing a book, use OpenOffice to add:
    • A Table of Contents
    • Page breaks after the title page, front matter page, ToC, and every chapter

    The html is simple enough that 1) the formatting transfers nicely to e-readers, and 2) you can edit the formatting manually with minimal experience by opening in Notepad. Or you can let it do all the html by opening in OpenOffice and editing there in a comfortable, Word-like setting without touching Word.
  3. Once you have your document, open Calibre, go to Add books and import the document. Then go to Convert books. The input format will be ZIP; set the output to EPUB. Go to Convert books again and convert the ZIP to a MOBI. This is the easiest way to make epub and mobi files, and these are the only ones you need. Mobi is used by Kindle, epub is used by everything else. You can also make a PDF if you so desire. Other things to do in Calibre:
    • Under Edit metadata, add the cover (and edit the metadata)
    • In there is also a Comments section (right). If you really want to learn html to format manually and learn best by example like I do, play around with formatting in there and hit the HTML Source tab to get an example of what your html should look like. You can learn everything you need about html for this purpose in that little box.
    • Preview in the Calibre reader to make sure everything looks the way you want it to.
  4. From your Calibre library, open the mobi file in the Kindle and review it there. If you are unsatisfied, you will have to go back to the original document, edit it, and reupload/reconvert in Calibre. This is the most tedious part of the process.
  5. Make accounts on Amazon's KDP and/or Barnes and Noble's PubIt and upload the mobi and epub files, respectively.

And you have published an e-book for $0!
Mobipocket
  • I used Mobipocket before I used Calibre to make my mobi file. It “looks easier”, but only produces mobi files, and if you like having many options available to you in the future in case something comes up, I would use Calibre. In retrospect I will probably not use Mobipocket in the future. Calibre is an “ebook manager” while Mobipocket is a “creator”, but Calibre has the functionality to build an ebook.

There are many services that offer to build your ebook, design the cover, and market it for you in one package. I plan to avoid them all. As shown here, there is no reason to pay for the actual building of an ebook. I am just as convinced that there is no reason to pay for a “professional” cover design. By following some basic principles you can make a decent cover for free (to be addressed in a future entry). As for marketing services, I don't personally know how useful those are. I have read mixed reviews. But I am convinced that you can do this without paying for middleman services, too, and I will be updating about my experiments in this arena... as soon as I have some!
Baltimore Book Festival!

I will be at the 2011 Baltimore Book Festival on Saturday, September 23 at Mount Vernon Place. If you are in the area you should stop by between noon and 8pm! If you are not in the area, you should drive or fly to the area, book a nice hotel suite, and invite me over after 8pm, as I will be very tired.
Here will be another great learning opportunity. I very excite.

I will have hard copies of my book at the festival, but for now, check out the e-book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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