As a very small publisher we’ve only concentrated on printed books to date. However, with our first full length novel on the horizon, aimed at the Young Adult market, we wanted to explore ebooks for the first time. 

 

Personally, ebooks hold no attraction for me at all. I like the tactile experience of a book, but I appreciate there’s a massive swathe of people across the globe who feel otherwise. Coupled with this is that because we’re such a small publisher it’s always an uphill struggle to get noticed and obtain wider distribution, so being able to tap into a global market through the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google is understandably appealing.

 

My aim here is to create an occasional diary entry on the blog of our experiences with the ebook market. I’m not aiming to teach you how to do it, but I do want to share how we did it, where we went to learn things, how we found it, what went right and what went wrong. 

 

I’ve spent the best part of twenty years using Adobe InDesign for print layout, and the print version of Natural Phenomena had already been laid out using it. I knew InDesign could be used to create ebooks but I just wasn’t sure how. My presumption was that it would be like exporting to a PDF, so potentially a few minutes' work, but the reality was very different.

 

Incidentally, you may be thinking of using Word, Pages, or another programme for your layout. It is possible to do it that way, but it’s not the route I’ve taken here. If you’re not a design professional and you’re attempting to create something in a non-professional manner you may not end up with a product that reflects the quality of the written content of the book.

 

The industry standard format for ebooks is ePub, or more specifically ePub 3.0. I hunted around for some online advice for creating such a thing in InDesign and, after a few dead ends, found a brilliant training course on LinkedIn Learning run by Anne-Marie Concepción called Indesign CC 2018: EPUB. LinkedIn Learning requires a subscription, but there’s a trial period you can take advantage of without committing to the full service.

 

 

Anne-Marie is an exceptionally good instructor, taking the time to patiently go through each step, explaining the jargon, helping you understand why something has to be done in such a manner, and generally getting you where you need to be with the minimum of fuss. On only a handful of occasions did I need to search for a further explanation (typically the Adobe forums) if I wasn’t getting the result I was being told I’d get, and invariably it was my misunderstanding that was causing the problem. The course is four and a half hours long broken down into bite-sized chunks, so you can do it in one hit or in small bursts. I ended up doing it across three days. I decided to adapt my InDesign print file alongside taking the training, applying what I’d learned in each segment to arrive at a document that ticked all the necessary boxes come the end, so this naturally added a lot of additional time.

 

I’ve mentioned that I thought it would be as easy as outputting a PDF, and that it wasn’t. That’s because ePubs are to all intents and purposes mini, enclosed websites, so they need specific formatting and general fiddling applied that is not dissimilar to creating a site for the web. It’s not necessarily tricky, but because I hadn’t applied much of the formatting required when I’d created the print version of the novel I now needed to go through every paragraph again and ensure everything was ePub ready. Next time I lay out a novel I’ll do this at the layout stage of the print book so it can be carried across.

 

 

Once I’d completed the course I also took the shorter course Learning Ebook Publishing by Jason Matthews. Not all of it was relevant to me as the first half concentrated on using Word to prepare a manuscript, but there was still plenty of value, including the ways you can distribute your ebook, how you go about doing it effectively and what potential pitfalls you can avoid.

 

Both Anne-Marie and Jason spoke much of Amazon and the Kindle. It has over 80% of the ebook market, but typically of Amazon they want you to do things very much on their terms. That includes the fact that they don’t accept ePub, the very file format I’d just spent an age preparing. Fortunately, they make it easy for you to convert one, just as long as your ePub is up to spec (so all the more reason to prepare it properly).

 

I’ll write some more shortly on my experiences with Amazon and the upload process.