ePub Author Question – What Are the Parts of an ePub File?

Let’s open up the hood and see what’s inside an ePub.

The first thing to know is that an ePub file is actually a compressed collection of files, just like a .zip file. In fact, if you make a copy of an ePub file and change the ePub’s file extension from .epub to .zip, you would have the following .zip file that can be unzipped to extract the contents so we can view them: 

An ePub file and a copy of the file with the file extension changed from .epub to .zip

We can now unzip the .zip file and view its contents. After unzipping, we see that an .epub file consists of the following two folders ( the OEBPS folder and the META-INF folder) and one file (the mimetype file):

The main three parts of an ePub file: two folders (the OEBPS folder and the META-INF folder) and one file (the mimetype file).

 
If we open the META-INF folder, we can see that it has one file (the container.xml file) as follows: 

The one file in the META-INF folder - the container.xml file.

The container.xml file provides the location of the content.opf file as shown in the following image. The content.opf file contains important information such as the epub’s metadata (author name, published date, etc.), manifest (a list of every item in the epub file), and the spine (the order in which items are viewed as the reader scrolls through the epub). The content.opf file will be discussed shortly.

There will be additional lines of code in the container.xml file if encryption or digital rights management has been added to the ePub file. The container.xml file has been opened up below in the text editor Notepad++, which works well on a PC. You might use a text editor such as Text Wrangler if using a Mac.

The container.xml file provides the location of the content.opf file.

Below is the mimetype file opened in Notepad++. The sole purpose of the mimetype file is to indicate that this is an ePub file.

The mimetype file has just one line which states that the file is an epub file.

 
Clicking on the OEBPS (Open eBook Publication Structure) folder reveal the following three folders (the Images folder, the Styles folder, and the Text folder) and two files ( the content.opf file and the toc.ncx file):

OEBPS folder's three folders (the Images folder, the Styles folder, and the Text folder) and two files ( the content.opf file and the toc.ncx file).

 

Opening the content.opf file in Notepad++ reveal three main parts of this file. The first part of the content.opf file shown below contains all of the metadata (author name, publication date, etc.) for the ePub file. The second part of the content.opf is the manifest for the entire ePub file. Every item in the entire ePub file is listed in the manifest. 

The content.opf file's metadata section and the manifest section.

The third part of the content.opf file is the spine. The spine, shown below, provides the order in which the parts of the ePub file will be viewed as the reader scrolls through the ePub eBook. 

The content.opf file's spine section.

If we open up the toc.ncx file in Notepad++, we can view the contents of the ePub’s built-in navigational table of contents as follows: 

The toc.ncx file showing the built-in navigational table of contents.

 Clicking on the Text folder reveals the collection of XHTML files that are the contents of the ePub eBook. Each XHTML file is a single section of the eBook.

The Text folder’s XHTML files. Each XHTML file is a separate section of the ePub eBook.

Opening up one of these XHTML files (New_Manuals.xhtml) shows the XHTML code. This is the same code that appears on web pages. An ePub file is just like a mini web site. One line of code contains a hyperlink and the last line links to an image, just like the HTML on a web page. 

The XHTML code of one of the sections of an ePub file, just like a web page.

If we open up any of the XHTML files in a web browser, it will open up just like a web page. We will open the above file (New_Manuals.xhtml) in the web browser Firefox and we’ll see that it views just like a web page, as shown below. This demonstrates how similar an ePub file is to a web site. In fact, the best tool to create an ePub is an HTML editor used to build web sites such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web (my favorite).

Opening one of the ePub file's XHTML files in the web browser Firefox. This shows how similar an ePub file is to a web site.

 

Clicking on the Styles folder shows a CSS style sheet (stylesheet.css). The Styles folder will always contain at least one CSS style sheet. There can be more than one. Opening stylesheet.css in Notepad++ shows the CSS styles in this style sheet which control all formatting and styling in the XHTML pages. 

The CSS style sheet that controls all formatting and styling in this ePub document.

 The Images folder contain all of the images (jpegs, gifs, or pngs) in the ePub document as shown below:

All of the image file within the ePub document.

 

Now you see how it all fits together and how an ePub document is very similar to a mini web site.

ePub Marketing – How Do I Set Up and Sell My eBook On My Own Site With ClickBank?

If you have written a book and also maintain a web site or blog focused on the same topic as your book, you may have a match made in heaven. You can monetize all that traffic to your site or blog if you can entice some percentage of your visitors to purchase your book. You could send interested prospects to your Amazon sales page but I suggest you close the sale right there on your site.

I’ve been selling my eBooks from my web site: http://excelmasterseries.com/  and my blog: http://blog.excelmasterseries.com/ a lot longer than I’ve been selling eBooks with Amazon Kindle. It has been a profitable undertaking for me because eBook sales from my web site is my second largest cash flow stream behind Amazon combined sales (Kindle  plus hardcopy print-on-demand units sold). The blog article written right before this one discusses the Pros and Cons of selling from you own web site using ClickBank for payment processing. This blog article discusses  how to set up your web site and account with ClickBank so you can sell your eBooks directly to visitors on your site.

First of all, what is ClickBank?

ClickBank was founded in 1998 and is a secure online retail outlet for more than 50,000 digital products and 100,000 active affiliate marketers. ClickBank makes a sale somewhere in the world every three seconds, safely processing more than 35,000 digital transactions a day. They serve more than 200 countries, and are consistently ranked as one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the web. ClickBank is privately held with offices in Broomfield, Colorado and Boise, Idaho and is a subsidiary of Keynetics Inc.

For me, ClickBank is my payment processor.

Visitors who purchase an eBook from my web site will go through this purchase and payment process with ClickBank:

1. A site or blog visitor arrives on one of my product sales pages: http://excelmasterseries.com/ClickBank/Students/Student_Excel_Master.php 

2. If the visitor clicks a purchase link on the above sales page, he or she would be directed to a ClickBank order form for the specific product Here is the ClickBank order form for the product in the sales page above: http://31.solvermark.pay.clickbank.net

3. When the visitor completes the order form, ClickBank processes the credit card or Paypal payment. As soon as the payment is approved, ClickBank redirects the visitor (now a customer!) back to the product download page on my web site. My product download page has links to  download the eBook in three formats (.pdf, .epub, and .mobi) and links to download free e-readers  for each format (Adobe Reader for .pdf, Adobe Digital Editions for .epub, and the mobipocket reader for .mobi). I also provide my book in the .lit format but I don’t count .lit as a valid format any more because Microsoft has discontinued servicing that format. The following four consecutive images below show what the download page for this product looks like:

  

 

Download Page on My Web Site For a Product Sold Using ClickBank As The Payment Processor

 

There is really not much to setting your web site up with ClickBank to process payments for the sale of your digital downloadable products. After you have set up a vendor account with ClickBank and created your digital products, you are immediately ready to begin selling those products through ClickBank.

Setting up ClickBank to Perform Payment Processing For a Digital Product Involves Just the Few Following Steps:

1. On your web site, create a sales page and a download page for each product, similar to what is shown above.

2. Log into your ClickBank account

3. Go To Account Settings / My Products / Add New Product

4. Provide the name of the new product and a brief description. Finally, provide the URL of the sales page and download page (called the Thank You page by ClickBank).

That’s all there is to it. There are guidelines that must be followed when creating the sales and download pages. These guidelines can be found on the ClickBank site.

When a sale is made….

When a sales is made, ClickBank will immediately send an email to me with contact information for my new customer. I will then send the new customer a personalized thank-you email right away (nearly always that day). This has enabled me to start a number of deep relationships with my customers. It also goes a long way in reducing the number of refunds requested. In the two-and-a-half years I’ve been selling through ClickBank, I’ve only had a handful of refund requests and I believe the personal follow-up emails are a big part of that.

ClickBank charges 7.5% of each sale, plus $1. That’s a lot less than Amazon Kindle and Lightning Source charge. I gross 35% of the retail price of each Kindle eBook sold and about 30% of the retail price of a print-on-demand hardcopy sold from Amazon. Each eBook sold from my web site through ClickBank grosses me between 85% and 90% of my retail price.

ClickBank send out electronic payments three weeks after a sale is made. My payments have always been prompt and correct.

ClickBank is also one of the largest affiliate companies. You can drop your digital products into their affiliate network. I have not done so because I feel that my information products are not well-suited for sales through affiliates.

I’ve been using ClickBank for quite a while and I am a big fan of theirs. I especially like ClickBank’s ability to smoothly process payments from every corner of the world. I can’t recall every having had a problem with that aspect of ClickBank.
 
I like to use Paypal’s convenient invoicing system if I want to send an invoice through email for a service such as converting a book to epub format. For downloadable digital products however, ClickBank payment processing can’t be beat.

ePub Marketing – What Are the Pros and Cons of Selling Your eBook From Your Own Web Site With ClickBank?

Many self-published authors can create a strong and dependable cash flow stream by selling their eBooks from the own web site. I sell my eBooks from my web site/blog using ClickBank as the payment processor and the results have been very good. My web site/blog has now become my second largest source of book sales behind Amazon. The purpose of this blog article is to provide a list of pros and cons of selling your own eBooks from your own web site with ClickBank as your payment processor based on my own experiences of having done it for a few years.

Here are the Pros of selling your own eBooks from your own web site using ClickBank as the payment processor:

1. Top reason, the money! Every eBook you sell from your web site is nearly 100% profit to you, with a small payment to the payment processing company (ClickBank in my case). Amazon Kindle Direct doesn’t get to keep 65%. Barnes and Nobles doesn’t get to keep 50%. The print-on-demand company doesn’t get any of the loot either. The money is all mine, mine, mine! Downloadable information products such as eBooks are perhaps the most profitable thing that can be sold on the Internet. Every part of the sale can be completely automated and the overhead is negligible.

2. The payments from ClickBank are weekly. Everyone else pays monthly. The payments are electronically deposited and I’m happy to get them every week.

3. ClickBank payments are sent out much more promptly than any of my other sources of online sales. For example, Amazon Kindle Direct pays out at the end of the second month after sales are made. Lightning Source pays out at the end of the third month after any print-on-demand hardcopy sales are made. ClickBank pays out three weeks after sales are made.
 
4. ClickBank combined with my web site expands my global sales much wider than Amazon does. At least a third of the eBooks I sell from my web site are sold outside of the US.  You can take a look at the customer testimonials of one of my books to get an idea of how wide-spread sales can be from your own web site: http://excelmasterseries.com/ClickBank/Students/Student_Excel_Master.php None of the well-known online book stores seem to have a strong presence outside of the US. My own Amazon eBook sales from outside the US are a small fraction of my US-based Amazon sales. My ClickBank sales come from every corner in the world.

5. ClickBank can handle credit card or PayPal payments in just about any currency and from any location. I don’t deal with any aspects of payment processing for sales from my own web site. ClickBank has been a very satisfactory, cheap, turn-key, multi-national payment processing solution.

6. Second top reason – ClickBank sends me contact information (name, email address, and location) of every customer who makes a sale from my web site as soon as the sale is made. This is HUGE! Every time I make a sale from my web site, I email that customer a personal note thanking them for the sale. I also try to mention something nice and interesting about where the customers lives. These emails are usually sent out within a few hours of each sale. The customers are delighted to get a surprise personal email from the eBook’s author right after the sale is made. I have been able to create a quite a few very close relationships with my customers that all started with that one follow-up email. I also have a large email list of every customer whoever purchased from my web site. Is any of that possible when selling eBooks through an online book store? Nope. Amazon and B&N aren’t about to give up their customer lists.

7. When I sell my eBooks from my own web site, I can sell in any format. Amazon Kindle eBooks are all .mobi. B&N (and most other online book stores) sell .ePub eBooks. Several online book stores, such as the Google book store, provide downloads in the .pdf format. If you purchase any eBook from my web site, you get all three types of downloads at no extra charge.

8. When you sell from your own web site, you can include extra bonuses with each purchase as an extra incentive to make the purchase.  If you click on this link once again:  http://excelmasterseries.com/ClickBank/Students/Student_Excel_Master.php and scroll down the page a bit, you’ll see the extra bonus e-manual that I provide each customer. Certainly this extra bonus e-manual was the right nudge that turned at least a few fence-sitters into customers. To my knowledge, Amazon does not provide authors with the ability to offer bonus eBooks. That might be an effective sales tool for Amazon.

9. Selling eBooks on your web site through ClickBank allows you to create a very personal download page. When a customer’s payment is successfully processed, ClickBank directs the customer back to a download page that is on your web site. Your download page provides you with all kinds of great opportunities, such as upselling and writing a personal message to the customer. You have nothing of the kind going on with Amazon.

10. Unlike Amazon browsers, your web site visitors will not be shown eBooks that compete with yours. I’ve always wondered how Amazon customers who were just about to buy one of my books changed their mind at the last second as a result of being shown something else by Amazon?

There are more Pros that could be added to the list, but we should also discuss the Cons as well. I have found selling my eBooks from my own web site through ClickBank to be overall very worthwhile, but every good thing has downside.

Here are the Cons of selling your own eBooks from you own web site:

1. Your web site sale cannibalize your Amazon sales. The more units that one of your books sells on Amazon, the higher Amazon will rank that book in its search engine. The higher your book come up during Amazon searches, the more you will sell. Instead of making a sale on my web site, I could direct interested prospects to the Amazon sales page of the same eBook. If I did that, I certainly would have higher Amazon sales right now. Selling my eBooks from my web site no doubt has reduced my Amazon sales. How much, I’ll never know.

2. It’s a LOT of work put together an effective selling web site. I put my whole site together myself: http://excelmasterseries.com/ but I bet I would have saved myself an enormous amount of work if had I simply used a template available for such a  web site. You need to have pretty good graphic design skills and along with solid HTML, CSS, and PHP knowledge to do it yourself. You could hire someone to do it for you, but that’s not cheap.

3. If your works are nonfiction, you’ll need a blog, I believe. Nonfiction writers need to establish themselves as experts in their field and blogs are a perfect tool to quickly do this. Blogs are excellent traffic builders. Google loves a site with a blog because blogs normally provide up-to-date, relevant information on a topic. You can place a sales form right in your blog, as I do in mine here:  http://blog.excelmasterseries.com/  In case you are interested, the Excel Master Series blog is a Blogger blog and the blog that you are now reading is a WordPress blog, just so you can see the differences. The downside of a blog – It is also a LOT of work to regularly write good articles. Before you begin a blog, you’ll need to make sure that you have a passion for the topic and won’t run out of material after 10 articles. You can install analytics (I use Google Analytics) into your blog to find out how many of your sales are coming directly from blog visitors.  You will probably find you blog to be an excellent source of direct eBook sales, but, once again, it’s a LOT of work to maintain a blog.

4. Sales from your site are totally dependant upon the traffic to the site. You need to become a good Internet marketer to generate that traffic. Becoming a competent Internet marketer is a long road filled with countless fruitless, frustrating dead ends. I can’t tell you how many “sure things” that I’ve tried which didn’t move the traffic needle even a blip. It’s hard to predict what will work and what won’t. Sometimes only one out of five things you’ll try will bring more traffic. I haven’t hit a get-rich-quick speed bump yet in my pursuit of Internet marketing wealth. I know I’m a lot better at it than I was a few years ago, but each step forward usually came after a couple steps back. Generating substantial Internet traffic to your site is a long-term proposition involving a LOT of work.

So, there you have it. The Pros and Cons of selling eBooks from your own web site, based on my experiences of doing so. At the end of the day, selling my eBooks from my own site has been a profitable and worthwhile endeavor, but not the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

Author Question – Why Does It Take So Much Longer To Create a Print-On-Demand Book Than an ePub?

You would think that a book is a book is a book is a book, regardless of its final, destination format. Quite the opposite is actually the case. Yes, the content will be the same,  regardless of final format. But, that’s where all similarity ends. The differences between creating the files for POD (print-on-demand) and the files for an ePub are greater than night and day.

Before we go into the differences between creating POD and ePub, here is briefly what they both are. If you are a self-published author and your books are available on Amazon, your hardcopies will be sold in the form called print-on-demand and your Kindle eBooks will be sold in the format of .mobi, which is very close to the .ePub file from which it is derived. You, the self-published author, interact directly with Amazon Kindle Direct. Any eBooks or updates that you upload to Kindle will go live the next day.

In the case of POD, you are interacting only with the POD company. The POD company is a third-party aggregator and will conduct all interaction on your behalf with all online book stores for the sale of your hardcopies. Any POD files or updates that you upload to the POD company will take much longer to go live in the online book stores.

Now here are the reasons why it takes so much longer to create the files for a print-on-demand hardcopy book an ePub eBook:

1. The number one reason is the amount of formatting needed for the print-on-demand book. The hardcopy book is…. a hardcopy book. Every page of the book will be formatted from top to bottom. Every element of every page of a hardcopy book will have its own place on that page. An ePub eBook has very little of the on-page formatting that a hardcopy book does. ePub eBooks don’t actually have “pages” due to the ePub’s reflow capabilities. The contents on an ePub “page” that would show up on your e-reader screen would totally depend on your e-reader’s screen size and the font size that is set by you. You’ll never see page elements such as headers, footers, or page numbers in an ePub eBook because ePub “pages” have no set page length due to the ePub reflow capability. The only significant formatting issues in ePub eBooks are where to start the beginning of  each “page” and the horizontal positioning of elements, whether centered, floated left, or floated right. All ePub formatting is accomplished with CSS. All POD formatting is accomplished by directly placing each element in its designated location on its page. Adobe InDesign enables the use of CSS through its paragraph and character styles. I, however, don’t use InDesign to create print-on-demand files because my clients usually don’t have InDesign. They would not be able to open up an InDesign file that I am working on for them in order to give me feedback.

2. Right on the heals of point number 1 above, the additional formatting requirements of a POD book usually result in significantly more interaction between myself and the author than is the case when I am creating an ePub eBook. It is my job to make the book exactly as the author wants. I use Microsoft Word when creating the POD so I can send updated versions to the author as soon as I change anything. The authors always have Word so they can see exactly what I am doing and provide instant feedback. That’s the way they like it and that’s the way I like it too. The back-and-forth interaction between myself and the author when creating a POD definitely adds to the total time it takes to complete the job – but the end result is that the author gets exactly what he or she wants. And that’s what I want. Occasionally authors will apologize for the amount of feedback they are giving, and that always surprises me. When that happens I try to remind the author that the more feedback that he or she can provide, the better the book will be. I want their feeback.

3. An ePub eBook is only one .epub file. Creating a POD book requires creating two .pdf files. One of the .pdf files contains the book’s content and the other .pdf file contains that cover artwork.
 
4. The required specifications of an ePub file are much less stringent than .pdf files that will be sent to the POD company. ePub files have to meet the guidelines of the most current ePub standard. I put an ePub through a process called “validation” to ensure the current ePub standard is being met. If I have been careful when creating the ePub file, very few errors will need correcting upon final validation. Creating the two .pdf files for POD is a completely different story however. There are no ordinary .pdfs. These .pdf files must be configured to meet all of the standards of professional printing presses. Without going into details, I found the learning curve to be steep when I first started creating print-on-demand .pdf files for my own books.

5. One final factor that significantly adds to time it takes to get a POD hardcopy out on the market is interaction that you’ll have with the POD company. Compared with setting up an account on Amazon Kindle Direct, an account with a POD company seems like it takes forever to get going. I use a company called Lightning Source for all of my POD and I highly recommend them. But, like any POD company, there are lots of forms to be filled out. Right now I believe Lightning Source has five or six forms that are part of its account set-up process. Really, that’s not a huge deal but just takes a little longer than setting up with any online store to sell eBooks. One consolation is that the POD company will handle all interaction on your behalf with all online book stores from here on out.

ePub Marketing – Should You Sell Your eBooks Directly or Use a Third-Party Aggregator?

In theory, third-party aggregators should be the most efficient way to sell your eBooks. You just submit your eBook to a third-party aggregator with the a large network of online retail partners (such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the Apple iTunes Book Store, etc.)  and that’s it! The third-party aggregator places your eBook into its network of online retail partners and handles all details from start-to-finish. At the end of the day, you receive a royalty check from the third-party aggregator for cumulative sales from the entire network.

In theory, sounds great. The reality tells a different story. I tried a third-party aggregator for a while and I would not do it again. I heartily recommend going direct to each major online book store and not doing it indirectly through a third-party. Here is the experience that I had using a third-party aggregator:

I use a company called Lightning Source to create all hardcopy, print-on-demand versions of my books and all of my clients’ books. Lightning Source does an outstanding job at POD and also has the largest network of online retail partners through which your hardcopies will be sold. Lightning Source is a third-party aggregator for POD hardcopies and they are the best in the business. I wouldn’t use anyone else.

Lightning Source is also a third-party aggregator for eBooks. A while back, I was considering using a third-party aggregator for my eBooks. At the time I was already selling my eBooks directly through Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble. Lightning Source was also doing a great job as the third-party aggregator for hardcopy, POD versions of all of my books. Lightning Source seemed to be the logical choice to be the third-party aggregator for my eBooks as well, so I signed on the dotted line.

The experience didn’t go as well as I expected. I don’t want this blog article to be a knock on Lightning Source’s eBook distribution services because I really thought their service on this end of the business was quite professional and prompt. They probably do this as well as or better than anyone. Lightning Source is an outstanding company and I’m one of their biggest advocates. The main purpose of this blog article is to highlight the general issues that will occur anytime you use a third-party aggregator to distribute your eBooks.

Here are the issues that occurred during my experiences with a third-party aggregator which convinced me to go direct from here on out:

1. No Control Over Prices – You do not have control over the retail prices that your eBooks will be sold at throughout the third-party aggregator’s network of retail partners. Invariably some of the network partners will sell your eBook at a large discount. This will wreck your profits with Amazon. Amazon will set its retail price of your eBook based upon the lowest price that your book is sold anywhere else. You will then be paid your 35% or 70% Kindle royalty based upon that discounted price that your eBooks are now selling at on Kindle.

2. Retail Discounting Will Wipe Out Your Amazon Kindle Profits – You have no way to stop the above discounting of your eBooks except to completely remove your eBook out of the third-party aggregator’s distribution. Believe it or not, this is no easy thing to do. When my eBooks where being sold through Lightning Source’s network, they wound up being sold at a huge discount at the Borders online book store before Borders went out of business. Amazon Kindle Direct reduced the prices of all of my Kindle eBooks to match Borders prices. It quickly became apparent to me that Lightning Course could not control how Borders priced my eBooks. The only solution was to pull all of my eBooks from Lightning Source. That I did. It was definitely not an instantaneous shut-down. My eBooks remained in Borders’ online store for quite a while afterward. I had to make a number of requests to Lightning Source to get my eBooks out of Borders. It seemed to me that Lightning Source did not have firm control over their eBook retail partner network. I had a lot lower royalty payments from Kindle during that time than I would have if my eBooks had not been discounted. Amazon is the Big Dog. If you take care of the Big Dog, the Big Dog will take care of you.

3. No Sales Tracking – You have no idea where your eBook sales are coming from. As a marketer, I don’t like having no idea where my sales are coming from. Also, there was always in the back of my mind a sneaky little suspicion asking whether I was really being paid for all sales. How would I know if I wasn’t? I wouldn’t. I totally believe that Lightning Source completely on the up-and-up, but you will always be wondering whether you’re being paid for all of your sales if your eBook is being sold through a third-party aggregator.

4. Loss of Cover Images – Your front cover image won’t always make it out to all of the retailers in the third-party aggregator’s network. No one will buy an eBook online that does not have a cover image. That issue happened to me with Kobo. Kobo was one of Lightning Source’s third-party network partners. The cover images for all of my eBooks somehow did not make it from Lightning Source to Kobo. My eBooks were being sold on Kobo without cover images. I contacted both Lightning Source and Kobo repeatedly but it never got fixed.
 
5. No Control Period – Even though I have shut down all eBook sales  with Lightning Source’s third-party aggregator service months ago, my eBooks are apparently still be sold through them. I receive a little payment for eBook sales from Lightning Source every month. The amount is negligible, normally between $50 and $100, and it’s nice to get, BUT….. it worries me that they have that little control over their network that they cannot stop the sales of my eBooks at my request (actually, my repeated requests).

So, there you have it – my unvarnished experience with a third-party aggregator. Once again, this is not a knock at Lightning Source. They have all of my POD business and they’re great at it. With eBooks however, I highly recommend going direct with each major online book store. One of the most enjoyable parts of my day is to log on to the online retail books stores to see the latest eBook sales. Why deny yourself that pleasure? Go direct with the online book stores you can count your new money every day as well.

ePub Marketing – How To Use the Amazon Kindle Book Lending Program To Make More Sales

When you upload a new eBook to Kindle at 35% royalty, you are given the option to enroll your eBook in the Kindle Book Lending program. All Kindle eBooks sold with 70% royalty are automatically enrolled in the Kindle Book Lending program. If your eBook is in the 35% royalty category, I suggest enrolling the eBook in the Kindle Book Lending program because it can help increase sales.

Check the Kindle Book Lending Program Option When Uploading an eBook To Amazon Kindle

 Before we discuss how you can use the Kindle Book Lending program to increase sales, here are the major details about the program:

– The Kindle Book Lending program enables customers who have purchased your book to lend the book to friends for 14 days.

– You, the author/self-publisher do not receive any royalties and are not notified when your eBook is lent.

– You, the author/self-publisher may also lend your eBook, but only once.

Here are a couple of great reasons why the Kindle Book Lending program helps your sales:

– Lending your book is a strong endorsement of your book.  A testimonial by a friend is the best testimonial that your eBook can ever be given.

– The Kindle Book Lending program can be thought of as another free marketing channel, and a very powerful one at that. The Kindle Book Lending program provides an easy way for an enthusiastic reader of your book to become a public advocate of your works. Ever lent a book to a friend? You’ve probably only done that for book that you really liked. Lending a book to a friend is nothing short of a ringing endorsement of that book. That’s exactly what you want for your eBooks.

– Contrary to the way it may at first seem, the Kindle Book Lending program will not cannibalize your sales. Most likely the people who are borrowing your book would not otherwise have had contact with it. They would therefore probably never have had the opportunity to purchase the book.

Here’s how you can use the Kindle Book Lending program to increase the sales of your eBook:

– Write more books! The Kindle Book Lending Program enables your best advocates to pass out tasty samples your works on toothpicks to their hungry friends. After they’ve had a nibble, they’ll want more. Got more?

– Make it easy for the borrowers to buy your other works. Place links to the Amazon sales pages of your other works prominently and liberally throughout all of your eBooks. I also sell my eBooks from my web site and here is an example of how I place a link to a sales page in my eBooks:

Linking To Your Sales Page on Your Web Site Inside Your Kindle eBook

– Tell everyone how great your other books are! Place testimonials about your other works prominently in your Kindle eBook. If you are good at CSS, you can create a real nice testimonial page such as: 

Placing Reader Reviews of Your Other Books Prominently In Your Kindle eBook

These are just a few of the countless ways you can use the Kindle Book Lending program to introduce new customers to your other works, and make more sales. You are limited only by your imagination.

ePub Formatting – How To Add a Page Break To an ePub Document Using HTML or CSS

If you have opened up an ePub file in an ePub editor such as Sigil, you know that every separate XHTML/HTML file will appear as a separate page in an e-reader. There instances, however, that you might like to keep a lot of material in a single HTML file, but have it broken up into separate pages when viewed on an e-reader.

Maybe you have a lot of material that you would like to keep in one HTML file for ease of editing, but you would like it broken up into separate pages when read on an e-reader.

You can force page breaks in an e-reader by using either HTML or CSS. Here’s how to do it with HTML first.

Forcing a Page Break Using HTML

Suppose that a page of your ePub document looks like this when viewed in an e-reader such as Adobe Digital Editions:

ePub Page Without a Page Break Viewed In Adobe Digital Editions

 

Suppose that you would like this text to appear split up as follows (and still keep all of the HTML code for both pages in the same HTML page for easy editing):

Page 1

ePub Page 1 of Split Page Viewed in Adobe Digital Editions

Page 2

ePub Page 2 of Split Page Viewed in Adobe Digital Editions

 
To create the above you would need to insert the following HTML code where you want the page breaks to appear:

<div style=”page-break-before:always;”></div>

After you have added the page break, there is still one more thing that needs tweeking.

The page break will not allow formatting from the first page to continue to the second page. To continue the formatting from the first page, you will have to manually insert the formatting at the top of the second page. Below is the correct way to continue the styling. You simply apply the same CSS styling class from the paragraph before the break to the paragraph after the break as follows.

Here is what the HTML in the ePub editor looks like before this page break is inserted:

ePub HTML Code Before Page Split Is Added - Viewed in ePub Editor Sigil

Here is what the HTML in the ePub editor looks like after this page break and the CSS styling applied to the before and after paragraphs are inserted:

ePub HTML Code Correctly Inserted For a Page Break With Formatting Continued To 2nd Page - Viewed in ePub Editor Sigil

 Styling both paragraphs with the style before and after the break causes that style to passed along after the page break. Once again here are the 1st and  2nd pages as viewed in an e-reader as result of this style continuation:

ePub Page 1 After Page Split Added When Viewed in Adobe Digital Editions

ePub Page 2 After Page Split Added When Viewed in Adobe Digital Editions

Forcing a Page Break Using CSS

If you want to ensure that a page break always appears before certain kinds of headings or paragraphs (e.g. always put a break before A-headers), CSS is one good way to implement this. If you would like to place a page break before chapter/section headings, apply this line to the CSS style for the relevant chapter-head style(s):

page-break-before:always;

You can also place a page break after any specific element by adding this line to the CSS styling that element:

page-break-after:always;

CSS is great for styling elements that repeat themselves in your document because you can change all of the styled elements with just one change to the CSS.

ePub Formatting – The Best Way To Create Paragraph Spacing and First-Line Indenting

One of the ways that an epub closely resembles a mini web site is the formatting at the paragraph level. Just like within a web site, spacing between paragraphs in an ePub document should only be controlled by CSS styling,  never by adding line breaks, which do not export properly to ePub. 

Another paragraph-level formatting element that should always be controlled by CSS is first-line indents. Multiple spaces created with the space bar do not export to ePub.

Here is how to create the proper CSS using Adobe InDesign or an HTML editor in order to sedt proper spacing between paragraphs and first-line indents.

Suppose that you wanted to create paragraphs formatted like the middle one in the image below. This paragraph has blue font color, is bold, and in italics. There is also about 10 px of margin of space on all sides of the paragraph, and the first line is indented about 20 px.

 

ePub Document With Formatted Paragraph Opened Up In Adoble Digital Editions

Creating This Paragraph Formatting in InDesign

All of this styling can be contained within one InDesign Paragraph Style and then applied to specific text to create paragraphs styled just as above. Here’s how to do it from within InDesign.

First we have to open up the Paragraph Style dialogue box by Window / Styles / Paragraph Styles as follows:

 

ePub in InDesign - Bringing Up The Paragraph Style Dialogue Box

 

 Create a new styles button by clicking the New Style button. The newly created paragraph style is now called Paragraph Style 1, as shown below.

Adobe InDesign - Newly-Created Paragraph Style

 
Double-clicking on this style brings up the Paragraph Style dialogue box as shown below.

The InDents and Spacing tab is where first-line indents and space around the paragraphs (top, left, bottom, and right margins) are set. We can see in the settings below that 10 pixels of space (margin) has been added to all four side around the paragraph. It is also seen that each first line of a paragraph is given 20 pixels of indent. We have also renamed this Paragraph Style to “Indented Paragraph_1.”

 

Setting Paragraph Spacing and First-Line InDents For a Paragraph Style in Adobe InDesign

 
Below is the Character Color tab that the blue font color of the Paragraph Style can be set:

Setting Font Color for a Paragraph Style in Adobe InDesign

 

The tab entitled Basic Character Formats is where basic character formatting items such as font-family, bold, and italics are assigned to the font style.

When the style has been created, apply to text by highlighting the text: 

Highlighting Text in Adobe InDesign Before Applying a Paragraph Style to the Highlighted Text

and then apply that paragraph style to the highlighted text by clicking on the newly-created paragraph Style:

Applying a Paragraph Style to the Middle Paragraph in Adobe InDesign

 

When InDesign creates a Paragraph Style, it actually adds a CSS style to the ePub’s cascading style sheet that controls the styling and formatting of the entire ePub document. This can be seen by opening up the resulting ePub document in an ePub editor such as Sigil as below.

The newly created style is called indented-paragrap_1.

 

ePub CSS Style on CSS Style Sheet Created By Adobe InDesign

 

Below is, once again, the InDents and Spacing tab of the Paragraph Styles dialogue box. All of the margins are 10 px so only “margin” (and not top, bottom, left, or right margin) is configured in the CSS style created by InDesign.

 

ePub Formatting - Setting InDents and Paragraph Spacing in Adobe InDesign

If you were using an HTML editor to create this paragraph style, you would simply create the following style and add it to the ePub’s style sheet as follows:

 

ePub Formatting By Creating a CSS Style in the ePub's Cascading Style Sheet

You would then apply that text a paragraph of text as follows:

 

ePub Paragraph Formatting By Applying a CSS Style Directly into the ePub's XHTML Code

The above was shown by opening up the ePub file in ePub editor Sigil.

ePub Author Question – Are Author Services Companies Worthwhile?

An author services company is a sort-of a one-stop-shop for authors. Typically they offer packages of services to authors that include providing an ISBN, cover artwork, editing, interior layout, ePub conversion, print-on-demand conversion, uploading to online book stores, and marketing help. The question is: Are they a good deal?

Well, I guess I’m an author services company of sorts since I perform all of the above services for my clients except editing and cover artwork creation. It is always a good idea in business to keep an eye on your competitors and I’ve been doing just that with author services companies. I contacted a number of author services companies stating that I was a new author hoping to publish a manuscript. Since then I’ve had direct contact with the sales reps of each company and I’m on all of their email lists. Here is a summary of my experience with the author services companies:

1. An author needs to have regular interaction with the person who is converting their book into ePub or the .pdf files necessary for print-on-demand. Every conversion that I’ve ever done has involved lots of feedback and questions from both my side and the client’s side. There is no way that I could have done a good job at conversion without this regular back-and-forth with the client. I asked all author service companies about this and the answer normally implied that there would not be this kind of interaction. Typically the answer was, “The production department will handle the conversion.” I imagine that at least some of the author service companies had the conversion work farmed out cheaply overseas. It was fairly clear to me that there would be no interaction with the ePub converter in most cases.

2. An author should not have to pay for an ePub or print-on-demand conversion until the job is finished and the author has reviewed and is totally satisfied with the final product. The majority of author service companies wanted all of the money up front.

3. An author should be able to conduct negotiations with people who know what they are talking about. I asked some fairly basic questions about the company’s ePub conversion process to every sales rep. None of them had a solid understanding of the ePub conversion process. A few had no knowledge of ePub conversion at all. It reminded me a little of my mortgage loan officer days at the height of the real estate boom last decade when mortgage companies were hiring people right off the streets and putting them on the phones with little or no training.

4. An author should own the ISBNs attached to their books. Most of the author service companies will supply the ISBNs. In this case, the author service company will be listed as the publisher of record. If you are serious about being an author, you should own your own ISBNs.

5. An author who would like to provide print-on-demand hardcopies of their works should be able to expect high quality. The only real guarantee of quality in print-on-demand is Lightning Source. You want to make certain that your POD version will be done at Lightning Source if you chose an author services company. My suggestion is to go directly to Lightning Source or find someone experienced in doing POD with Lightning Source. If an author services company farms out the POD work to a lower quality printer, your hardcopy version could wind up with a shoddy binding and lower quality printing.

6. If you use an author services company, your cover artwork will produced from a standard template or by someone assigned to your account. You are infinitely better off locating your own cover artist that you are comfortable working with and trust.

7. Marketing your book is work that you will have to engage in on your own. Never purchase the marketing packages that author service companies offer. They’re a huge rip. Most of the sale reps that I dealt with tried to apply pressure on me to purchase one of their marketing packages. The “deluxe” package was normally more than $1,000.

8. Author services companies state that they will handle all aspects of distributing your book to the online book stores. That scares me the most. You, the author, absolutely want to working directly with Amazon yourself. There are many reasons for this. Most importantly, you get paid all of the royalties and you can upload any changes to your book that you want. You can’t do that if an author services company handles your Amazon account.

Another very important reason to maintain your own control over the distribution of your eBooks is that Amazon has a policy of matching the lowest price of your book anywhere it is sold. If an author services company places your eBook into an online retail bookstore that practices deep discounting, Amazon will reduce their retail price of your book to match the competitor’s discounted price. Amazon will then pay out royalties on its sales bases upon the discounted price. Amazon is the big dog that you need to take care of. Once your eBook gets into discount online retailers, it is difficult to shut that down. I went through that once and will discuss that experience in another article in this blog.

You may gather that I do not recommend author service companies. It is my feeling that many of them prey on new authors with lots of sales pressure to buy large, expensive packages that will not produce what is promised.

ePub Author Question – What Authors Can Do To Expedite Conversion To ePub

If you are having your book converted to ePub, here are a few things you can do to expedite the Process

1) Send the book in as many formats as you have available. The more formats that the ePub converter has to work with, the easier it will be for the ePub converter. Different ePub converters work best with different formats for incoming book files. Send everything you have to the ePub converter.

2) If possible, try to send the book file in a reflowable format, such as a Word file. A reflowable document is one can perform word wrap is you expand or contract the width of the document on your computer screen. For example, if you open a Word document on your computer and stretch or contract the document’s width, you’ll notice that the words will always reflow, that is, they will fall in place to completely fill out each line, regardless of how wide the line is. An example of a non-reflowable file type is a .pdf. The .pdf is the last stop in the conversion train. All formatting and styling is removed when a file is converted to .pdf. If you expand or contract the width of a .pdf file on your screen, you’ll notice that the text does not reflow. An ePub converter has a lot of extra steps to do with a non-reflowable file like a .pdf. The ePub converter has to remove the carriage return at the end of each text line in the .pdf. Following that, the ePub converter has to create all styling and formatting from scratch. I probably get about half of my incoming book files as .pdfs so I am used to doing this.

3) Try to have the images ready for emailing. If you have all of the original image files separate and ready to email over, great. Not every author does. Sometimes authors have only the final Word or pdf document to send over. In that case, I’ll have to recreate the images by taking screen shots and then editing those images in Photoshop. It just takes a bit longer.

4) Don’t worry about having the images sized and sharpened. All image files will have to be resized and sharpened in Photoshop by the e:Pub converter. That’s a given so don’t worry about image processing. Just make sure that the ePub converter has the tools (Photoshop preferably) and skills to do this. Definitely inquire about this because your images are a very important part of the final document that goes out to your paying customers.

5) Try to label the images so it is clear where they belong. This is one thing you can that will really help out the ePub converter. Rename each image file systematically so that the ePub converter can tell right away where the image goes. One easy system for doing this is to include the page number in the Word or .pdf document which contains the image.

6) Try to make sure that editing work is completed. I do occasionally get book files from authors that aren’t totally finished. That’s not a big problem, it just adds to the time that it will take to complete the entire conversion.

7) Try to learn a little about ePub so that you know the basic differences between an aPub document and a printed document. Probably the main difference that you’ll want to be aware of is that an ePub does not have page layout like a printed page. Page length in an ePub document (what the viewer sees on one screen of an e-reader) totally depends on the e-reader’s screen and the font size that the viewer has configured the e-reader to. ePub documents won’t contain items that are placed in specific spots on a page, such as page numbers, headers, and footers.

8) Be ready and expect to interact with your ePub converter. Creating a ePub document should involve a lot of back-and-forth between the ePub converter and the author. If this doesn’t happen, the author will be disappointed with the final result, because he or she did not have input into it. Make sure that you have direct and continuous access whoever is doing you ePub conversion work. This is extremely important to the author’s satisfaction with the final converted ePub that will be uploaded to online stores.

ePub Author Question – How Do I Get an ISBN and When Do I Need One?

As soon as you begin selling your books through retailers – both online book stores and brick-and-mortar book stores – each version of each one of your books will need a separate ISBN. An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a 13-digit code that identifies what book and which version of that book is being bought at retail. 

A single ISBN indicates the format of a specific book. For example, a single book sold as an eBook, a hardcopy, and a paper back should have at least 3 ISBNs assigned to it. Many people, even the official dispenser of ISBNs, will tell you that you need a separate ISBN for each version of eBook that you sell. That would mean a separate ISBN for the .mobi file uploaded to Kindle, a separate ISBN for an .ePub version sent to the other online book stores, and a third ISBN for the .pdf version. That’s not true. Just get a single ISBN to cover all eBook versions of your book.

If your book ever makes an eBook best-selling list, you would want all of your eBook versions to have the same ISBN so that all eBook sales will be tracked together. You don’t want your eBook sales information split up as would happen if different versions of the same eBook had different ISBNs. Certainly the .ePub sales from Barnes and Noble should be combined with the .mobi Amazon Kindle sales for the same eBook. ISBNs are sales tracking tools and should be thought of as such.

You get your ISBNs from R. R. Bowker, the U.S. Agency of the International Standard Book Numbering Convention. R. R. Bowker is the originator of ISBNs for U.S.-based publishers. Publishers in other countries can only obtain ISBNs from their local ISBN Agency, a directory of which can be found on the International ISBN Agency website.

You can purchase your ISBNs and assign them to your books by going to R. R. Bowker’s web site, https://www.myidentifiers.com/, and performing the following 3 steps:

1) Set up an account an account with Bowker at that web site. You’ll need to provide your business name and your contact information.

2) Log in to your Bowker account and purchase one or more ISBNs. As soon as you purchase them, they are available to be assigned to your books instantly.

3) Log in to your Bowker account and click on My Account. You’ll see a list of all of your purchased ISBNs both assigned and unassigned.  Assign one of your available ISBNs to a book by providing the book title and other information. That’s it. You’ve just assigned an ISBN to a book.

At the time of this writing, you can purchase ISBNs in units of 1, 10, 100, or 1,000.  The prices of each are as follows:

Single ISBN $125
10 ISBNs $250
100 ISBNs $575
1,000 ISBNs $1,000

I suggest that you buy quite a few more than you think you’ll need. My first purchase was 10 ISBNs and I went through them in about 2 months. My next purchase was 100 ISBNs, which I should have done initially since I am going through them so quickly. If you just plan to write one version of one book, there are author servicing companies that can provide an ISBN to you. In this case, they will be listed as the publisher of the book.

If you are a serious about being an Indie (independent) author and anticipating writing more books, I strongly recommend purchasing your own ISBNs. I would personally never consider authoring and selling a book without owning the ISBN.

When you purchase your ISBNs from Bowker, you can also buy Bookland barcodes. If your book is sold in hardcopy, you’ll need a barcode on the cover. However, if you are a self-published author and use a company called Lightning Source to create your hardcopies (I can highly recommend Lightning Source for print-on-demand since they have done a great job for me), you don’t need to purchase barcodes from Bowker. Lightning Source will create a barcode for your book. This barcode will be part of the cover artwork template that they send to you to prepare your book for upload to them.

ePub Author Question – What Is a Fair Price For ePub and Print-On-Demand Conversion?

Converting a manuscript to ePub and converting to Print-On-Demand are two completely different animals. This blog article will cover the major parts of each process so you can see what you are paying for.

Creating an ePub

I generally charge $150 for converting a book to ePub. If there is a lot of image work or difficult formatting, I may charge a bit more. Here are the major parts of converting a book to .epub/.mobi:

1. Create a text file containing the book’s content. That usually  is just a simple copy-and-paste the contents into a text file. This can normally be done no matter what format I receive the manuscript in. If I receive the book file as a .pdf, I have to take the additional step of deleting all carriage returns at the end of each line. This can be time consuming for a long book. Inserting the content into a text file removes all formatting. I will later rebuild all formatting with CSS styles.

2. Paste the text file into an HTML editor. An ePub file is actually a mini web site complete with pages of XHTM, a cascading style sheet, and a folder of images or links to images. An HTML editor such as Dreamweaver (I use Microsoft Expression Web) is the best tool to build a web site and also the best tool to build an ePub, which is a mini web site. Each page of HTML code will contain one chapter from the book. I could paste the text into Adobe InDesign but I like to work directly with the HTML and CSS code, which InDesign does not allow.

3. Break all text up into separate paragraphs.

4. Build a CSS style sheet with all formatting styles for paragraphs and characters.

5. Apply all styles to paragraphs and characters.

6. Build the table of contents by applying <H1>, <H2>, and <H3> tags.

7. Copy and paste the style sheet into an ePub editor. My choice of ePub editor is Sigil.

8. Copy and paste the HTML code from the HTML editor into the ePub editor.

9. Resize and sharpen all images in Photoshop. Images should be 72 ppi and no more than 500 pixel wide or tall. The cover image should be somewhere around 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels tall.

10. Insert all images into the ePub editor.

11. Create the table of contents page, which is a page of HTML bookmarks that link to the chapters.

12. Insert all page breaks with the ePub editor.

There will normally be a lot of feedback from author when I am creating the ePub file. I send the author a link to download a free e-reader (Adobe Digital Editions) so the author can view the ePub document as I am making it. I will normally email the updated ePub file to the author whenever I make any additions or changes.

Creating Print-On-Demand

I generally charge $200 to create the two .pdf files that Print-On-Demand companies require. If there is a lot of image work or difficult formatting, I may charge a bit more. One .pdf file will contain the books contents and the other will contain the cover artwork. These .pd files are not ordinary .pdf files. The files go right to the printers at the Print-On-Demand company. There are numerous detailed specifications that these .pdf files are required to meet in order to be printer-ready. Here is how I create the two .pdf files:

1. Create a text file containing the book’s content. That usually is just a simple copy-and-paste the contents into a text file. This can normally be done no matter what format I receive the manuscript in. If I receive the book file as a .pdf, I have to take the additional step of deleting all carriage returns at the end of each line. This can be time consuming for a long book. Inserting the content into a text file removes all formatting. I will later rebuild all formatting.

2. Paste the text file into a Word document. At this point, the file will be completely without any styling or formatting.

3. Create all formatting with Word formatting tools.

4. Create the table of contents using the table of contents builder in Word.

5. Create any headers and footers that the author wants.

6. Resize and sharpen all images in Photoshop. Print-on-demand requires that all images are 300 ppi and CMYK or Grayscale color mode. I generally try to make sure that all images are no more than 5 inches in width or height.

7. Download cover artwork template from the print-on-demand company. I use Lightning Source for all of my print-on-demand books. I am very satisfied with their service. The cover template is something that is customized based on the number of pages and the type of binding. It can be sent in several types of formats. I request mine as .pdf files.

8. Open the template up in Photoshop and build the cover. This ultimately winds up being a very large file because it must be saved at 300 ppi.

9. Upload the two completed .pdf files to the Print-On-Demand company. If everything is OK with the files, the Print-On-Demand company will send a proof of the book to the author. As soon as the author approves this proof, the Print-On-Demand company will get the book listed in the catalogs of all of their partners, such as Amazon. The Print-On-Demand company handles all aspects of order fulfillment whenever a customers makes a purchase.

There is normally a lot of feedback between myself and the author when I am creating the Print-On-Demand files. I send a copy of the Word file to the author when I make any changes or updates. The authors are generally very involved during the file creation stage.

ePub Marketing – Which Online Book Stores Will Produce the Highest Sales For You?

A question that just about every author who has written an eBook asks is, “Which online book stores should I sell my eBook in?”

I can answer that question with this question: ”Where do you buy books online?” Note that the question was not “Where do you buy eBooks online?” Book buyers like to shop for books and eBooks from the same place online. The reason is that an online book store which sells both hardcopies and eBooks will have larger selection than a store that sells only hardcopies or only eBooks. The convenience of a one-stop shop that has everything is huge.

If you were asked, “Where do you shop for books online?” Most likely your answer would be, “Amazon.” Many people might search in one or two other online book stores besides Amazon, but Amazon is generally a first stop for most people. It is also the last and only stop for most online book buyers as well.

Amazon is, therefore, where you should focus your selling efforts for your eBooks. Amazon is the big dog. The rest – all of them – are much smaller players. I’m sure this blog article might generate some flaming replies but I call ‘em like I see ‘em.

Here are the main reasons that Amazon owns the online book store space and will only grow more dominant in the future:

1) Amazon has been in the game the longest. They now have the largest volume of book-buying traffic by far.

2) Amazon has almost become the generic term for online book store. If someone suggests that you buy a certain book online, they would probably say without thinking too much, “Buy it on Amazon” not “Buy it at the Apple iTunes book store.”

3) Amazon has done the best job at creating convenience. Convenience is major factor in choosing an online shopping venue. Amazon’s buying process is the easiest of all the online book stores. Amazon has even streamlined the purchase process down to “One-Click” for repeat buyers. Amazon’s book selection is the widest. Today’s online buyers are simply not willing to spend time evaluating many alternatives if they can get a good product with good reviews at a reasonable price quickly.

4) Amazon’s product review system blows the rest of the competition out of the water. Everyone, and I mean everyone, checks out Amazon book reviews before they buy a book on Amazon. No other online book store has a review system that can touch Amazon’s. That trust factor that Amazon’s unvarnished and comprehensive book review system creates is an unbeatable and growing advantage for Amazon. Amazon has made social media its most powerful selling tool.

There is no reason not to sell your eBooks in other online book stores besides Amazon. Just make sure that your focus is on Amazon. What I mean by that is the following:

– Use Amazon to determine your correct price point. Amazon has the most online book store traffic by far. You’ll find out most quickly what works and what doesn’t.

– Focus your effort on getting Amazon book reviews. Reviews can make or break your book. Amazon’s product review system is miles ahead of the competitions and creates a trust factor among online book buyers that can’t be beat.

– Direct book buyers to your product page on Amazon before you send anyone to another online book store.

The online book store industry is starting to undergo a shakeout similar to the search engine industry’s shake-out over ten years ago. You might remember when there were many popular search engines. Now there is Google and everyone else. There is not even a close number two. Yahoo and Bing combined have just a fraction of the search traffic that Google has.

Google’s dominance has forced other search engines move to niches in order to survive. The same will happen to the online book store industry. Other online book stores that do not effectively differentiate themselves from Amazon will eventually follow Borders out of business.

The shakeout is on! Focus your online eBook selling efforts on Amazon. There is nothing wrong with being in the other online book stores, but Amazon is where you need to make it.

Print-On-Demand – Another Profitable Way To Sell Your Books on Amazon

It is common knowledge that ebooks are taking over book sales and that hardcopy book sales are going the way of cassettes after CDs came along.

Not so fast……

Hardcopy sales are doing fine. You may be missing out in a big way if you only sell your books as eBooks and not as hardcopies. Most of my own self-published books are sold as both eBooks and as print-on-demand hardcopies in the major online book stores. The eBooks usually sell more units but on some months the hardcopies do outperform the eBooks. My print-on-demand hardcopies have become an excellent source of income every month for me. They can be for you too.

If you are self-publishing and selling eBooks on Amazon Kindle or will be soon be, definitely consider creating a print-on-demand version of your books that will be sold on Amazon in addition to your Kindle eBooks. It was totally worth the effort for me to do this with almost all of my books and it might be for you as well.

Here is what Print-On-Demand is all about:

Print-on-demand services are offered by printing companies to self-publishing authors. In summary, the self-publishing author sends specially formatted .pdf book files to the print-on-demand company. The print-on-demand company takes over everything from there. The print-on-demand company will make sure that the book is listed in the catalogs of all of the major online bookstores, such as Amazon. The print-on-demand company also handles all aspects of printing and shipping the book when a customer places an order with an online bookstore. After the entire transaction is completed, the print-on-demand company will electronically deposit the royalty payment in the self-publishing author’s bank account.

Your book must be converted to two .pdf files for submission to a print-on-demand company. One .pdf file will contain all of the cover artwork and another .pdf file will contain your book’s contents. These .pdf files have very detailed and specific requirements because the print-on-demand company requires both .pdf files to be submitted printer-ready for their professional quality printing presses.

Creating these printer-ready .pdf files requires detailed knowledge of printing standards and also how to implement them in .pdf creation using Adobe Acrobat. All of the book’s images must be configured in Photoshop to be printer-ready as well. Here is a link to a page on my web site which will give you some idea of the requirements that the .pdf file must meet. Scroll down to the bottom of this web page to see the partial list of specifications:

http://epubandebookhelp.com/Publishing-Help/Print-On-Demand-On-Your-Own.php

I use the print-on-demand company Lightning Source for all of my print-on-demand books. They have always done prompt and professional work for me. I can definitely recommend them. Lighting Source is the largest company in the print-on-demand business. They are connected with more online book stores than any other print-on-demand company. They used to be Amazon’s recommended partner for print-on-demand. At the time of this writing, Amazon currently uses another company, CreateSpace, as their recommended partner. I don’t know what prompted the change.

I like Lightning Source simply because they do a great job. You can get a quick look at one of my print-on-demand hardcopy books that Lightning Source created in this video, if you are interested in seeing what their work looks like. About 3 minutes into this YouTube video you’ll see one example of a print-on-demand book that Lightning Source makes and sells for me:

>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOBJbAhMgVo

A common misconception among authors is that Amazon requires print-on-demand to be done by CreateSpace. Authors can use any print-on-demand company that they want.  My recommendation is Lightning Source because of the excellent and profitable work that they have done for me. I don’t want to sound like I’m knocking CreateSpace because I’m not. I am sure they do excellent work as well. I just have never tried them.

If you are interested in finding out more about print-on-demand for your books, feel free to email with any questions at my email address shown above, which is mark@epubandebookhelp.com .

ePub Formatting – How To Float an Image in ePub Left or Right With Word Wrap

If you are placing any images into your ePub, three basic formatting tools you probably want are 1) Text wrap, 2) Float right, and 3) Float left. If you are creating your ePub with Adobe InDesign up to version CS5, you’ll have to implement text wrap and floating left or right by writing the CSS yourself. This blog article will show you how to do that.

Text wrap functions in Adobe InDesign ( at least up to version CS5) do not export to ePub. If you have created your document within InDesign, you’ll need to export to ePub and then open the resulting ePub file in an ePub editor such as Sigil (my favorite). When doing this, remember that you cannot open up that ePub file in InDesign again. Make sure all of your InDesign work is completed on the file before you export to ePub.

As I probably mention in almost every article in this blog: an epub document is just like a mini web site complete with pages of XHTML, a cascading style sheet that controls all styling and formatting, and a folder of images or links to images. When you open your ePub up in an ePub editor, you’ll see the pages of XHTML and the style sheet.

To apply text wrap and float left or right to an image on a page of text in an ePub document, you need to do two things:

1) Open up the style sheet and add a CSS class for float left or float right.

2) Apply that style to the image.

These two things are also just what you would do if you wanted to float an image left or right and have text wrap around it on a web page.

Let’s go through the process and see how it looks:

1) Open the ePub File in an ePub Editor. Here I am using ePub editor Sigil, my favorite. You can see that an epub file is just like a mini web site. Here we can see the single page of XHTML content named Page_1.xhtml. We can also see the cascading style sheet named template.css. The top half of the display shows the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing screen and the bottom half is the XHTML editing screen 

Open ePub File in ePub Editor Sigil

 
2) Place the Cursor Where You Want To Place the Image and Hit the Insert Image Button. Select the Image To Be Placed. 

Add Image to ePub in Sigil With the "Insert Image" Button

Here is the image after insertion:

An Image in ePub Before Applying CSS

 Note that the image is placed inline with its line of text. You can see the XHTML code for this image in the XHTML editing screen. This is all you can do with Adobe InDesign CS5. To apply a float left or right along with text wrap, you need to create and apply a float class to the image as we are about to do.

3) Open Up the ePub’s Style Sheet in Sigil. This style sheet is named template.css. Adobe InDesign created this style sheet. Each CSS style created by InDesign whenever you create a Paragraph or Character Style always has at least the following 11 attributes: 

Open Up the ePub's Style Sheet in Sigil

4) Create the FloatLeft Class as Shown Below. This class enables float left and text wrap simultaneously, just like it would on a web page. 

Create the CSS Float Class for the ePub in Sigil

5) Apply This Class to the Image. You can see the FloatLeft class applied in the XHTML editing screen. You can see that the image now floats left and also performs text wrap. 

ePub Image After Applying the CSS Float Class

Here is the “before” image again so that you can compare the difference:

ePub Image Before Applying the CSS Float Class

That’s it!

ePub Author Question – Skills and Qualities That Your ePub Designer Absolutely Must Have

The person who creates or converts your EPUB document needs to have the following skills to perform professional and polished work:

1) Strict guarantee of quality – No invoice should be sent until the customer is totally satisfied with the finished product. Being asked to pay up front for ePub conversion is a red flag. Most other types of contracting services do not ask for payment until the work is finished. An ePub converter who does top quality work would have no worries about getting paid only after the client is totally satisfied with the work. Directly ask when the ePub converter expects to get paid. The answer should be, in every case, “Only when you are totally satisfied with the work and all changes are completed.” Why accept anything less?

2) Outstanding HTML design skills – An ePub is a mini web site complete with pages of XHTML, a cascading style sheet, and a folder containing images or links to them. Would you pay someone to build your web site if they didn’t have expert knowledge of HTML and CSS? Sure not. You also should not hire a non-expert in HTML and CSS to build your mini web site, that is, your ePub document. Ask if the ePub converter knows how to build an ePub in an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or Expression Web. Also ask what ePub editor the ePub designer uses. Any decent ePub designer will be totally at home with at least one ePub editor, such as Sigil. Another red flag here is the ePub editor that only knows how to create an ePub in Adobe InDesign. Adobe InDesign has a number of limitations that require the ePub designer to get under the hood and tinker directly with HTML and CSS. A person who is not a solid HTML design person cannot do a good job at ePub creation.

3) Deep CSS design skills – Ditto for CSS skills. All formatting in an ePub document is controlled by a cascading style sheet, just like a competently designed web site. You definitely want to see demonstrated HTML and CSS skill before you let anyone work on your ePub.

4) Graphic design skills (preferably with Photoshop)  – All images going into an ePub needed to be sized properly, sharpened, and have the resolution set at between 72 dpi and 150 dpi. 150 dpi is the most common resolution. Photoshop is the basic tool for this type of graphic work. You probably won’t have your images looking as good as they should if your ePub converter is not facile with Photoshop. Ask if the person owns and uses Photoshop. If that person states that they don’t have this basic tool of graphic design, he or she probably can’t do the work on your images that needs to be done.

5) Strong working knowledge of an EPUB editor such as Sigil – I can’t remember ever creating an ePub that I did not have to considerable tweeking afterwards with Sigil. If an ePub converter cannot claim to be skilled with an ePub editor, you should not even consider using that person to convert your book to ePub. This is an absolutely essential skill in ePub design.

6) Solid working knowledge of EPUB validation – Any ePub sent to an online book store must be validated. Ask the ePub converter what validation is. The answer should be that validation is the process to ensure that the ePub conforms to the latest ePub standards. Ask how the ePub converter will perform the validation and provide you with verification that the validation was completed.

7) Accessibility – Your ePub converter should always return emails within a day, without exception. Ask if you can expect this. Also, ensure that the ePub conversion work is not being farmed out. Every ePub that I have ever created for a client has been totally customized work that would not have been possible if the client did not have regular access to me through email.

8) Their own self-published works – If an ePub converter has never successfully self-published anything on Amazon Kindle, he or she does not have a complete picture of what is happening. There are a number of formatting items specific to Kindle that an ePub designer has to be aware of. I learned quite a bit from self-publishing all of my book on Amazon Kindle and also as hard copy print-on-demand books on Amazon. Ultimately that is where you want your books to be. Hire someone to do your ePub who has been there, done that.

9) A short turn-around time – It should not take more than a few days to have an ePub created and validated. You will probably need a few more days to go back and forth with final changes and corrections.

10) A reasonable price – I generally charge around $150 per conversion, unless there is a lot of extra work involved, such as substantial image processing or unusual formatting. If you are paying less than $100, you are probably not getting competent work done. You definitely get what you pay for if you use price as the most important deciding factor in the selection of an ePub designer. A bargain rate ePub will probably have to be redone completely somewhere else. I have several clients who went through that before they came to me. If an ePub converter is asking more than $250 and your manuscript does not have any unusual difficulty, the price is too high.

If you ensure that you are dealing with a fair and competent ePub designer from the start, you are very likely to get a finished product that you will be proud to sell under your name.

ePub Formatting – How To Convert a PDF file to EPUB

Converting a .pdf document into an .epub document can be done, but there is no easy way. I really wish that there was because I quite often have to convert a client’s manuscript in .pdf format to an .epub/.mobi for upload to the online bookstores. There are a number of software packages that claim to be able to do this. I’ve tried them all and they all do a terrible job. If you Google “pdf to epub” you’ll get a list of these software packages. If you are curious, I invite you to try any of the packages (they usually have trial versions) and view how badly they scramble your document. If any of these packages worked, it would make my life a lot easier because I do epub conversion for a living. I would be using it, believe me.

One of the main reasons that there is no instant way to convert a .pdf to .epub (with an .epub document that actually resembles the initial .pdf document in any way what-so-ever) if that an .epub file is actually a mini web site. Just like a web site, an .epub file contains pages of XHTML content code, a cascading style sheet that controls all styling and formatting, and a folder containing all images or links to all images.

A .pdf file cannot be converted directly into a web site nor can it be converted directly into an .epub, which is also a mini web site.

Probably the most important reason that .pdf files are darn hard to properly convert to any other format is that .pdf files contains none of the original formatting information that was in the initial document (for example, a Word file). This includes all of the basic building blocks of formatting such as line breaks, paragraphs, headers/footers, and columns. All  of this information is destroyed when the .pdf is created.

The .pdf file is the last stop on the conversion train. All of the basic formatting information is destroyed when the .pdf is created. The initial Word document and the final .pdf document will look exactly the same, but the .pdf document  now has only coordinates about where and how each object should be displayed on the page, but no longer contains any of the original formatting info.

What this means for anyone converting a .pdf to .epub is that there are no shortcuts. You need to go back and manually put all of that formatting information back in. When clients ask me to convert an .pdf document into an .epub, I always ask if the client has the original document in another format, such as Word or InDesign, which will contain all of the formatting information.

I create all of my .epub documents using InDesign or an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web (my favorite). I prefer using an HTML editor because I have direct contact with and total control over the XHTML and the CSS. The HTML editor provides me with the greatest ability to customize an .epub document.

Here is how I prepare a .pdf file for insertion into an HTML editor or Adobe InDesign. As I mentioned, there is no easy, automated, short-cut way to do this correctly. If there was, I would be doing it.

The first step is to extract all of the text out of the .pdf file. You can open the .pdf file in Adobe Reader and click Edit / Select All. After all of the text is highlighted, click Edit / Copy.  Open up a text editor such as Notepad and paste all of that text in.

Probably one of the first things you will notice is that original line breaks that were in the Word document (before it was converted to .pdf) are no longer there. The .pdf placed a line break (a carriage return) at the right side of each printed line. You will have to go through the entire document and remove ALL of the carriage returns that do not belong. This is a huge PITA but there is no way around this. This is the first step in returning the formatting information that was destroyed when the .pdf was created.

The next step is to separate each paragraph from the others. In the text file, you can do this by hitting a carriage return at the end of each paragraph. This will create a space between paragraphs so you can visually identify the paragraphs.

Once you have the line breaks installed correctly and all paragraphs separated from each other, you are ready to drop all of that text into Adobe InDesign or the HTML editor.

Several other articles in this blog describe how to create an .epub file using Adobe InDesign or an HTML editor. These articles can guide you from here.

The basic steps you’ll be taking from here are to paste all of this text into either Adobe InDesign or an HTML editor and add all other formatting and styling. In Adobe InDesign, you’ll do that by applying Character or Paragraph styles to the text. In an HTML editor, you’ll be applying CSS styles to the text.

As I mentioned, I really, really do wish there was an easier way to do this and get a professional result. The creation of a .pdf file destroys all of the formatting information that is essential information for creating an .epub. You have to remove the text from the .pdf file and manually add all of that formatting information back in.

ePub Formatting – How to Resize an ePub Image in Photoshop Before Inserting It Into an ePub

Images inserted into an ePub document should be sized correctly and have a resolution of 72 ppi. This blog article will show how to do that in Photoshop.

First, little background info about pixels and resolution. Resolution can be thought of as pixel density, that is, how many pixels are packed into a space. Resolution is measured in ppi (pixels per inch). Sometime you might hear resolution measured in dpi (dots per inch) but that is not technically correct. Dpi is a measurement used by your desktop laser printer, which print dots of color. Incidentally, if you using Photoshop to create an image that will be printed on your desktop laser printer, you’ll get the best-looking image by setting the ppi resolution in Photoshop to the dpi of the printer (which can be found in the owner’s manual)

Another resolution measurement that you should also be aware of is lpi (lines per inch). Professional printing presses print images that are composed of tiny shapes, usually circles. Lpi is the measurement that tells how many of these shapes getting printed per inch.

Your computer monitor and the viewing screen of an ePub e-reader cannot take advantage of resolution higher than 72 ppi. On-screen resolution is handled by a video driver, which results in a 72 ppi image looking exactly the same as a 300 ppi image. Any resolution above 72 ppi for an image simply increases file size, but does not improve the image’s appearance onscreen at all.

Printers, on the other hand, can take advantage of higher resolution. A 300 ppi printed image definitely looks sharper than the same printed image at 72 ppi. If I were to convert your book into the .pdf files for submission to a print-on-demand company, I would need to set the resolution of all images to 300 ppi. If you are a self-publisher, you would use a print-on-demand company to print and sell hardcopy versions of your book in the online bookstores such as Amazon. Most of my own self-published books are sold on Amazon as both ebooks and hardcopies printed by the print-on-demand company Lightning Source.

Now, here’s how you use Photoshop to resize your images for ePub and set the resolution at 72 ppi. All of this work can performed in the Image Size dialog box. Access the Image Size dialog box by Image / Image Size. Here is the resulting Image Size dialog box that will appear:

 

Photoshop Image Size Dialog Box For Sizing ePub Images

 

You are most concerned with Width and Height in the Pixel Dimensions box and the Resolution in the Document Size Box. The Width and Height measurements in the Document Size box tell how big the image would be if printed on a printer. You don’t have to worry about those measurements.

Set the resolution to 72 ppi (pixel/inch) and then set the Width and Height in the Pixel Dimensions box. An ePub image should not have its Width or Height Pixel Dimension set greater than 500 pixels. Images wider or taller than 500 pixels might not fit completely into the viewing screens of many e-readers.

Leave Scale Styles checked. If you have applied any styles in Photoshop to the image, you want those styling effects to be resized the same as your image.

Leave Constrained Proportion checked. This locks the width / height ratio when the image is resized.

Leave the Resample Image checkbox checked if you want to change image resolution without changing image quality. Resampling is the process of adding or subtracting pixel when an image is resized.

For the type of Resampling, select Bicubic Sharpener. Photoshop experts claim that this Resampling method produces the best results when images are enlarged or downsized.

Having set your image’s Width, Height, and Resolution correctly for insertion into an ePub document, you are now ready for the last step, which is to sharpen your image. The previous article in this blog explains how to use Photoshop sharpen in image for insertion into an ePub document.

After sharpening your image, save it by File / Save for Web & Devices. Here is the dialog box that appears:

 

Photoshop "Save for Web & Devices" Dialog Box For Saving ePub Images

Save the image as a JPEG and select Maximum Quality with a number setting of 100. Make sure the Image Size is set correct and Save it. “Save for Webb & Devices” automatically saves images at 72 ppi resolution. I prefer to do that in the Image Size dialog box and then sharpen the image. This way, I will avoid any surprises that might happen if you let “Set for Web & Devices” change the resolution.

ePub Formatting – How To Sharpen an Image in Photoshop Before Inserting It Into an ePub

Not too many things make an epub document look more unprofessional than grainy, fuzzy images. All images should be sharpened right before insertion into an ePub file. Sharpening is always the very last thing you do to an image before inserting it wherever it goes. Sharpening your images is definitely an important part of ePub creation and this blog article will provide basic instructions on how to use Photoshop to sharpen images using Photoshop’s most popular sharpening tool – the Unsharp Mask.

First of all, what is image sharpening? Image sharpening involves increasing the contrast between edges. You are making the lighter edge lighter and the darker edge darker to create a stronger contrast and greater sharpness.

On the down side, sharpening can easily be overdone, resulting in a “sharpening halo” which is  a white gap between lighter and darker pixels. Sharpening can also highlight noise in the image. You’ll want to get rid of as much noise as possible before sharpening.

Sharpening is the very last step you should perform before inserting the image into the ePub. Here are the steps in Photoshop you should take before undertaking the final, sharpening process:

1) Open up the image file in Photoshop. I normally open an image file as a Smart Object (File / Open as Smart Object), duplicate that layer, and rasterize the duplicate layer.

2) Resize your image. This is the first step. An image going into an ePub should not exceed 500 pixels in height or width. A larger image will not fit into many ePub e-readers all at once. Image resolution should be set at 72 ppi for ePub, just like for the web. To change an image’s size and resolution in Photoshop, click Image / Image Size and set the Pixel Dimension and Resolution.

3) Get rid of as much noise as possible, or you’ll end up sharpening noise. Photoshop’s best noise reduction tool is the noise reduction filter. Access this with Filter / Noise / Reduce Noise. Photoshop filters process the current layer so you either want to create a duplicate layer to run the filter on or convert the image to a Smart Object so the filter will run in its own layer.

Here are the sliding bar settings in this filer that you can adjust:

Photoshop's Noise Reduction Filter for Reducing Noise Before Inserting an Image into an ePub File

 

– Strength – If you have lot of bright or colored grains (called color noise), increase this sliding bar setting to reduce this noise in every color channel.

– Preserve Detail – This setting helps protect details within your image. You’ll need to find a balance between this setting and Strength setting because each does almost the opposite.

– Reduce Color Noise – This setting, like the Strength setting, reduces random color specks in the image.

– Sharpen Details – Don’t use this. Use other and better sharpening tools available in Photoshop.

– Remove JPEG Artifacts – This removes some of the blocky look the lower quality JPEGs sometimes have.

– Advanced – Allows you to adjust individual color channels. Noise most often occurs in the blue channel.

4) Duplicate the layer again before sharpening. Sharpening is a destructive process that runs on the current layer. Create a backup of an image on a duplicate layer when sharpening it.

5) Change the sharpening layer’s blend mode to Luminosity. Because Photoshop lightens and darkens quite a few pixels during sharpening, there is a risk that the color on the image may shift. When you change the sharpening layer’s blend mode to Luminosity, the sharpening only affect the brightness of the pixels, not the color of the pixels. To set a layer’s blending mode to Luminosity, left-click that layer in the layers panel, select  Blending Options / blend mode: Luminosity.

6) Start the sharpening process.
Photoshop sharpening tools are filters that are available by: Filter / Sharpen. The two most useful sharpening filters available are the Unsharp Mask and Smart Sharpen. The Unsharp Mask is the most popular and easiest-to-use sharpening filter so it will be discussed here in detail. Here is how to select the Unsharp Mask:

 

Selecting the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop In Order To Sharpen Images Before Insertion into an ePub File.

1) The Unsharp Mask – This sharpening filter has been with Photoshop for a long time and is the favorite sharpening tool for many people because it is so quick and easy to use. The Unsharp Mask looks at the contrast between pixels and determines whether (according to your Threshold setting) there is enough contract to be designated an edge. If the Unsharp Mask determines that it has found an edge, Photoshop lightens the lighter pixels and darkens the darker ones to the Amount setting that you have set. The Unsharp Mask has three sliding setting that can be adjusted as follows:

– Amount – This is the amount of sharpening intensity that is applied. Sharpening intensity determines how lighter light pixels become and how much darker dark pixels become.

– Radius – This setting controls how far from the edge the sharpening affect is applied.

– Threshold – This setting determines how different neighboring pixels have to be before the Unsharp Mask considers them to be an edge.

Here is what the Unsharp Mask and its level setting look like:

 

Using Photoshop's Unsharp Mask to Sharpen an Image Before Insertion Into an ePub File

Good settings for sharpening an image to be inserted into an ePub are Amount to 200 percent, Threshold to 0, and Radius to 3. The exaggerated Amount (200) is suggested because images are often downsized to fit into an ePub e-reader (ePub image height or width should not exceed 500 px). Downsizing an image makes the image softer thus requiring more sharpening.

2) The Smart Sharpen filter has a lot more options and is more complicated than the Unsharp Mask. This filter takes a bit more practice than the Unsharp Mask and will be the topic of another blog article.

A few more tips:

– If you wish to sharpen a multi-layered image, you should combine the images into a single layer and sharpen that layer. You’ll drive yourself nuts trying to figure which individual layers to sharpen. The best way to combine layers is not to combine them directly but only make a copy of what would be the combined layers. Make this copy of the combined layers by selecting all layers simultaneously that will be part of the single combined copy layer. Select multiple layers simultaneously by holding the CTRL button down while selecting consecutive layers. Toggle the visibility of each layer to “Visible” using the “eye” toggle switch on the layer. Then, click CTRL / ALT / E simultaneously. The single copied combined layer will appear on top and no other layers will not be affected. Apply the sharpening filter to this copy layer.

– You can sharpen only a part of an image by applying a mask to the layer and exposing only the part of the image that you want to sharpen.

– One way to reduce the effect of one pass of the Unsharp Mask is to “fade” the filter. After you have run the Unsharp Mask and before you do anything else, go to Edit / Fade. You can set how much you want Photoshop to reduce the effect of the Unsharp Mask filter.

There. Now your image is ready to be inserted into the ePub. You’ve done a good sharpening job if the sharpening effect is not noticed by viewer. They just notice how clear the image looks.

ePub Formatting – How To Create an EPUB With Microsoft Expression Web

There are a lot of ways to make an ePub, but for anyone with HTML and CSS skills, there’s only one best way. What a lot of people don’t realize is that an ePub document is little more than a mini web site.  A good web designer can very easily build a polished and professional ePub using the same HTML editor tool that he or she would use to build a web site. Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web (my favorite) are excellent choices.

Just like a web site, an ePub file consists of pages of XHTML content, a cascading style sheet that controls all formatting and styling, and a folder of images or links to images. ePub readers “view” ePub documents almost the same way that a browser views the Internet.

If you wish to view an ePub’s pages of XHTML or its style sheet, open the ePub file up in an ePub editor. The most widely used ePub editor is Sigil. It is a free download. Just Google “Sigil” to get the download link. When you open an ePub file in Sigil, you’ll see a collection of folders. The first three folders you’ll see are the Text folder (holds the content pages of XHTML), the Styles folder (contains at least one cascading style sheet which control all formatting and styling), and the Images folder (contains all images or links to images).

If you decide to use an HTML editor such as Dreamweaver to build your ePub document, just set up the same folder structure in Dreamweaver the same as is in Sigil. You only need to set up the Text and Styles folder in the HTML editor. You won’t be working with any images in the HTML editor. 

Here is a view of the Text, Styles, and Images folder within Sigil:

ePub Editor Sigil With Text, Styles, and Images folders

 
Here is a view of the Text and Styles folder set up inside the same directory in the HTML editor (Microsoft Expression Web):

HTML Editor With Text and Styles folder to create an ePub

Once you have set up the file structure (the Text and Styles folders within the same directory) in the HTML editor, create a stylesheet in the Styles folder of the HTML editor. Name the stylesheet in the HTML editor using the same name that it has in Sigil. You can see that the stylesheet here in both the HTML editro and in Sigil is named stylesheet.css.

You then create your pages of web content in the HTML editor. All styling and formatting must be derived by the stylesheet. Don’t even use the Bold button to bold text. Create a CSS style that bolds text when applied and then always that style instead of hitting the Bold button.

After you have created your web page in your HTML editor, simply duplicate the same pages in Sigil. For each web page you’ve create in your HTML editor, create a new page in the Text folder of Sigil and cut-and-paste the HTML from the HTML editor into that Sigil page.

Once you have created all of your pages in Sigil, insert the images. That is a simple matter of viewing a page within Sigil in the design view, click  the cursor where you want to place the image, and then click the image insert button in Sigil. You’ll select the image on your hard drive or wherever it is stored and it will then be inserted where your cursor was.

Before placing images into Sigil, you should trim the image files to 500 px max in both width and height, downsample to 72 ppi, and convert to RGB color mode if necessary, sharpened, and save them as .jpeg, .gif. or .png.

That’s it! You’ve just created an ePub by hand. There are a lot more touch-ups that you can do at this point, but you’ve done all the heavy lifting. Your ePub document in its basic form is created.

Here is a step-by-step video which will show you exactly how to perform the above steps, and a few others as well. By the end of this video, you’ll be able to create a basic ePub document using an HTML editor (such as Dreamweaver) or an ePub editor (such as Sigil).

I(Is Your Sound On?)

Step-By-Step Video Showing How To Create the Most Customized Possible ePub

If you create your ePubs this way, you will have much more control over the XHTML and CSS than you do with all other ePub creation tools. You’ll be able to customize your ePub in ways that other tools such as Adobe InDesign can’t touch. That is why I create most of my ePub documents with an HTML editor just like the video shows. If you have good HTML and CSS design skills, you most likely will want to use an HTML editor to create an ePub file also. It is not the easiest way to create an ePub, but it will produce a more most polished and customized ePub than any other method, by far.