Ebook Creation

TheRisingEbookSigil

This week work on the WIP has been suspended until I can finish making the ebook of The Rising for my Newsletter subscribers. It’s nearly complete, so only a few days will be spent polishing it up. This is a special release that will only be available to the subscribers. It is not the final release of the book. That will happen later this year. So if you are a subscriber, enjoy this sneak peek at the ebook and please inform me if you find errors.

When I make an ebook I use Sigil. This time around I converted my manuscript to html using LibreOffice and then sucked that into Calibre to make the ebook. After all that, I loaded the epub into Sigil and added all the other pages required for an ebook. Experimenting with workflow is just part of the job when you do things yourself. In Sigil I ensure the epub has all the pages that my other ebooks have for consistency.  For the reader, once they upload it into their reader, The Rising should match all the other books in the series. There will be a few new things in the title though, noting that it’s book 2 of the Star Saga.

 

Tales From Ocherva and Tyrmia now on Kobo

Just a quick note to let you know that you can now purchase my novel Tyrmia and my anthology – Tales From Ocherva, Volume One on Kobo. Both ebooks are DRM free and epub formatted. Enjoy!

These two ebooks are also available in other formats from Smashwords. Click on the book covers in the right hand side bar to select a vendor.

 

Sigil, Epub Creator

I’ve been trying to find a quick and easy way to make epub formatted e-books for a while now. My search is finally over. It’s called Sigil, and like many of my favorite programs, its free and open source. Sigil is an epub creation tool that lets you cut and paste your novel, chapter by chapter, and insert it into an epub formatted structure. It’s fast and easy and yet gives you enough control to tweak your e-book just the way you want it.

Sigil works on Linux, Mac and Windows and works the same on all three platforms. This is not a requirement for me, but it can be quite convenient for households with more than one flavor of computer. What was a requirement for me was the ability to wrap every paragraph into <p> tags so that I didn’t have to write a script to do it myself. When you paste your chapter into a new file in Sigil, it converts it to basic HTML better than anything else that I have found. From there you can format it however you like with whatever embedded font or picture you have.

A few of the epub specific files are not editable in the current version, but if you really need to edit them, just unzip the epub file of your book and hand edit them. Future editions will offer more control over all the files in an epub folder. I used Sigil to make the epub version of my latest book and was very pleased with how quick and painless the process was. I basically did the whole book in a couple of hours. That was including the play time needed to get familiar with how Sigil works.

The project is hosted on Google Code servers and is written in C++ with native look and feel under each OS. You can follow the developers on their blog here. Because this is an Open Source project, you could have a say in future features of the product.