Monday, June 6, 2011

Upcoming eBook conversion guide

I intended to blog on Thursday the 2nd but I fell ill.  Then the weekend hit and I was very busy with helping my business on Western Days, and then lending the rest of my weekend for the SocialGeeks.com MegaLan that was held at the local community Collage.  (csi.edu)

It was a fun weekend.  We ended up going overboard a little bit with the number of available seats, but it is better to over prepare, than get swamped.  I spent most of my time acting as security and registration for the event.  Then I organized and ran the StarCraft II tournament.  This is the second time that I have run this tournament for SocialGeeks.  They are getting bigger, better, and faster so I am quite proud of that.  And everyone had a good time with it.

Back on topic of the publishing world and the status of my first book.  Requiem.  I still do not have a cover for the book yet, and that is all that remains before it will be available for the eReader world.  Paperback version may take a while longer to format.

On this journey to self publish a book, I spent many hours researching how things are done.  A lot of it makes sense, and a lot doesn't and even more just tends to piss me off.  Like the whole $25-$50 for someone to have their ISBN converted into a bar code.  This brings me to a future blog that I am going to do that seems to have little information available for.  I am going to write a guide on how to convert your manuscript into the formats you need for the Amazon Kindle and the B&N Nook.

If you are using a service already like CreateSpace or SmashWords who will do this for you and are happy with the results, then continue to do so.  If you are a first time author or looking for a guide in general, then this will be for you.  Having worked for Dell inc. for 8 years, I am more familiar with the computer world than the average bear.  So when I found a websites that offered conversion services for $100-$1000 depending on the size of your book and anywhere from 15-90 days for the process to complete, I figured I would learn how to do it myself.  I don't have 3 months to wait and an extra thousand dollars laying around, and it smelled of the same bad deal like charging for a bar code.

I spent about 6 hours of research, but when it came down to actually doing the conversion.  It took about 2 hours to download the apps, modify my manuscript format and convert.  Knowing what I do now, it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes to create both your Nook and Kindle ebooks.  So look forward to this in an upcoming blog.

3 comments:

  1. I look forward to seeing this. Does this include creating a TOC and making sure you can get rid of any crazy formating you may have introduced? I quite often get submissions that have things like R20 where an apostrophe should be. Not sure what formatting is being used when that happens.

    Cheers
    Nadine

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  2. I am curious about Nook and Kindle Ebooks. Look forward to seeing your book cover.

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  3. The R20 is an HTML/URL code. The reason you see that is because the conversion from txt to html. Where you will see this the most is in URL addresses. Special characters like apostrophe, blank spaces are illegal characters in web addresses. So you will see this when it gets converted into a URL and thats what a Table of Contents is but it doesn't get translated back properly.

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