So, I’ve been exploring the subject of how to get into self-publishing and generate my own professional-looking books. General agreement is that the best software for doing this is Vellum, though that has both a prohibitive price ($250 for the full package), and it only runs on a Mac.
Besides that, there is a slew of open-source programs that, altogether, will probably accomplish the same tasks but with considerably more difficulty for the end-user.
Adding to these difficulties, my laptop is now extremely out of date. I’m still running Windows 7 and much of the software I would like to try will only run on Windows 8 or later. This includes Amazon’s free Kindle eBook generator.
When I started exploring this, I naïvely thought at first that I might not have too much difficulty. As it turns out, eBooks are packages of CSS and XHTML files. I saw some authors complaining that most of the software aside from Vellum requires some coding knowledge, and I thought to myself, “Hold on, I can write CSS and HTML.”
So I took an eBook generated in Vellum and pulled it open using an open-source EPUB editor called Sigil, and I didn’t have too much difficulty figuring out how it was built. Not only that, but I thought to myself that, by editing the code directly, I could probably create a much cleaner, more compact file with fewer <div>s and without all the unused CSS rules. I could stick to readable web-safe fonts too. Small file size, after all, is important to sales and royalties since Amazon takes its slice based on file size.
So I started editing the first volume of Jake and the Dynamo in Sigil, and while I could indeed make a slim file with a lot of the same cosmetic features typical of a professionally generated eBook, it was incredibly time-consuming, basically requiring me to insert and edit each paragraph individually (mostly to make sure the italics were in the right places). With a judicious selection of web-safe font stacks, the existing images, and some proper HTML semantics, presto, the result was what you see in the header.
The result looks good in Sigil. But that’s the important part—in Sigil. I opened it with another program and started seeing problems, such as my drop-caps wandering all over the page (and I don’t know why; the CSS for my drop-caps is very similar to how WordPress does it).
But the biggest mess came from Amazon, which insists on a proprietary filetype, MOBI. I made the conversion to MOBI using Calibre, which I can only use in an older version because the latest doesn’t work on Windows 7, and the result was a complete mess. Most especially, either the MOBI filetype or Calibre (not sure which) doesn’t like a lot of my CSS; the kind of stuff I’d do on the web to make sure images resize while keeping their proportions, or to stylize certain tags, apparently doesn’t work in Amazon’s eBooks.
I’ve been needing for some time to update my computer, and that need has become more apparent over the last few days as I’ve repeatedly tried to run software that simply won’t run on my antiquated system. What I’m thinking at present is that I might go ahead and shell out for a refurbished Macbook and a copy of Vellum, and then continue to plod along with my current system for everything else as long as possible. Meanwhile, I’ll add a laptop-update fund to the monthly budget.
