Tag: self-publishing

Experimenting with Vellum

I am currently in the “completely bewildered” stage of preparing to self-publish my work, with the goal of releasing no less that five (three, absolute minimum) books next year. I’m considering several options, thinking about services I might need, looking at necessary or unnecessary software, and so forth.

I have just finished (?) editing the first volume of Jake and the Dynamo. This may sound like unnecessary fiddling, since the book has been edited and even published previously, but I am treating the next release as if it is the first, a complete start-over, and I want to present readers with the best, cleanest, most professional text I can. This new version is, at present, almost 3,000 words shorter, entirely because of improvements in style and grammar.

One thing I’ve thought I would likely do is purchase Vellum. Although it’s enormously expensive, it is more or less the only software that prepares a manuscript for multiple formats with minimal hassle. Its creators allow you to download it and use all its options, forcing payment only when you’re ready to generate the files.

Thus, I have been sitting here sipping a gimlet (one part gin, one part Rose’s lime juice, and nothing else, as Raymond Chandler explains) while familiarizing myself with Vellum and getting a handle on what it can—and can’t—do.

It is as user-friendly as it claims to be, but that seriously limits its abilities. Some formatting I have in Word, formatting I thought was quite minimal, has been stripped out of my Vellum file. For example, it doesn’t allow lettered lists:

Lists in Vellum.
An unordered list in Vellum.

This is a little disappointing, but I can easily envision a reason for it: The idea is maximum compatibility across readers and file types. I found some software previously that allowed for edting EPUB files in XML, and I originally thought that put me on easy street since editing XML is something I can do, but I soon discovered that editing files by hand was time-consuming and also produced unexpected results in different types of eBook readers.

Vellum, despite the claims in its advertisements, feels very limiting. It offers only a handful of styles with minimal customization, few fonts, and few layout options, but it also keeps you from inadvertently creating messed-up files that don’t work on major platforms. The few layouts it allows look good. Sme things I want, such as handwriting fonts in a few spots, aren’t possible—but then again, that’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t show up on most e-readers anyway, and eBooks are where I can expect the most sales. Kindle, for example, strips out all custom fonts and uses Amazon’s proprietary font in their place.

Also, in this first run, I experimented with Microsoft Word’s styles to produce the cleanest, lightest manuscript I could. A lot of what I did transfered straight into Vellum, and Vellum was even able to intuit some of the document’s features (most especially, its section breaks). Some things, however, did not transfer—particularly, text that was set to be in all caps (rather than typed in all caps by hand). To make sure everything is kosher, I probably need to make a few more tweaks to my DOCX file before I import it to Vellum again.

Self-Publishing: The Legend Continues

I am planning to re-release Jake and the Dynamo in the near future and to release its sequel soon afterwards. To that end, I recently purchased the cheapest refurbished MacBook I could get so I could download and buy Vellum, the software generally agreed to be about the only program for formatting self-published books for all platforms, and also the only eBook editing software that isn’t aggravating to use.

It’s darn expensive, though. I’m thinking I might offer to format others’ self-published books for them to make back some of the cost. I offer reasonable rates.

Anyway, I still need to get new cover art, so there is still no projected release date. I am also revising the text, and though this might seem like excessive editing, I want people to get the best, and a somewhat different, product from what was released previously. Interior illustrations will be the same as in the previous version.

The State of the eBook Exploration

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.