On the rights and pricing page, you choose the royalty rate and price in USD which determines the prices in the other Amazon markets (if you choose to make your book available there). Once you’ve input all this information, you can also save your progress and complete it later, but you can’t proceed to the second page without uploading a file for your book. Once your book file is uploaded into the system, you can preview it in a browser on the Amazon page, complete with images and everything. You also upload the cover and book file here. The details you need are: title, subtitle, description, ISBN, categories (which you choose from a list), age range, search keywords, and release date (if you plan to sell pre-orders). Once I had the manuscript ready, there were only two screens worth of information to fill out: the first asks for basic information and the second asks for rights and pricing information. The Kindle Direct Publishing user interface is really easy to use. I’m sure this has something to do with my total lack of Photoshop chops, but it was easy, quick, and produced results I could live with. I resized all my images using Preview rather than Photoshop because it seemed to produce better looking (and smaller) images. Once the image is in the epub, you can style it within the html view using the width tag. The program shows a list of the images that are in the epub and a preview of the image, which is really helpful. Find your photo locations within the book and then use the “Insert” menu to choose the file. Just right click on the Images folder and select “Add Existing Files.” This will load the images into the epub file. (I think this would include fonts as well if you want to use any special fonts.) At the bottom there are folders that hold the stylesheets, images, and other media that the epub uses. When you open an epub in Sigil, there is a browser on the left hand side of the program that shows all the html files. The instructions on the Kindle website are unclear about the process, and I think if you did it manually, it would involve creating a zip file of images, which sounds like a nightmare, but it’s actually very straightforward with Sigil. I was really confused about the image insertion process for a long time. I just left markers where I wanted photos and used Sigil, an easy-to-use open-source epub editor, to input and style the photos. After testing out images in Scrivener, I didn’t even bother trying to get Scrivener to format my images correctly. It’s better to use Sigil to insert images into epub files than Scrivener. If you have fancier things you want to do with your styling, then it might be best to find a way to output the simplest epub code possible and style the CSS yourself. I have to admit that my formatting is extremely simple. I saved myself a lot of time, and judging from tests on the Kindle Previewer and on the Amazon website, it will look just fine. This is ugly code.Īfter talking it out on the Literature and Latte forum, however, I decided to live with the compiled code, and I’m glad I did. Linebreaks to render paragraph spacing in epub. For a while I was determined to code the whole damn thing from start to finish, especially after I saw that Scrivener generates hard I composed the project entirely on Scrivener, which was great until I realized I had to compile into epub, which is basically html with a few bells and whistles. Scrivener produces really good epub files. The publishing part of the process was almost as interesting as the writing part, and I thought I’d share a little of the experience here. My goal with the book is to make those first few steps easier and more affordable for others. It was frustrating to wade through all the homebrewing noise on the Internet, especially when it came to building a mash tun, but once I’d done it and brewed a few batches, made a few recipes, it didn’t feel so hard. The book, however, is only a recent development which I started after transitioning to all-grain brewing last year. Other than reading Murakami, homebrewing is one of the things I’ve been doing the longest. My first book “ Goldilocks Homebrewing: An Introduction to All-grain Homebrewing for Those Who Want Just Enough Information” is now available for pre-order on the Amazon Kindle Store.
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