E-Books have liberated writers and authors. Anyone with skills to write an engaging narrative can now reach her audience through various online retail platforms and pitch her eBook. And if your story is engaging, your fans can easily catapult you to the top of the stack and make you the next Bestselling author in days.
But writing a book alone is not the end of it all. You need to do extensive market research and identify the best platforms and formats for your eBook. With a plethora of devices, many with their proprietary formats, it has become increasingly difficult to publish a book for all these devices. eBook production is further complicated if you have a book that has a lot of charts and pictures. For a self-publishing, first-time author, the task of creating an eBook in multiple formats is one of the major challenges.
However, there are multiple economical, and expensive alternatives to get your book ready for these devices and publish in multiple formats.
Microsoft Word
No matter how much you hate Microsoft, Word has enough juice to give you what you need. For fiction authors, where there are almost no charts or pictures in the book, Microsoft Word is perhaps the best option to get your book ready for Kindle or Smashwords.
All you need to do is follow their formatting guideline and you have a book in multiple formats ready for you to distribute. The Smashwords formatting guidelines are a little bit more stringent. But if you have it ready for them, you don’t have to worry about Kindle.
For authors who are writing a comic book or a picture book, this is of course not the tool you should opt. To get the images right and have hard-set formatting you will need more advanced publishing tools.
In Design
Adobe’s InDesign is one of the best options you have if you need to create a picture book. There are multiple options where you can design a specific page layout and show images and text in a fixed format. This ensures that you don’t have text flowing all around the screen at odd places.
The latest version of the software lets you choose if you want a flexible text layout or a fixed text layout that is compatible with the eEPub3 format.
You can subscribe to the InDesign monthly plan and get you e-book ready in a month for $30. However, if you have never used any publication software or Adobe tools, expect a steep learning curve and factor in the time to learn and experiment with different options.
Quark Express
Like InDesign, QuarkExpress can be used to create books for both print and digital publishing. So if you are planning to put your book on CreateSpace or a similar Print-on-Demand platform, this is one of the tools that you should consider.
Although the tool has all the features that you need for creating your book layouts and formats, the cost of the software – $849 – is prohibitive, on top of the learning curve.
Sigil
Sigil is an open source software which you can use to add and edit text and export to different eBook formats. With all the features of a typical WYSIWYG editor, the tool creates the HTML code in the background. You can enable the HTML view if you need to edit something through the code.
The tool also includes an EPUB validator to help you check that your eBook code is rendered correctly and as you expect. The tool is free, but you will need to be familiar with HTML and CSS Styles if you really want to use the power of advanced functions like style management and create bookmarks etc.
Vellum
Vellum is an Apple exclusive tool that you can use to create eBooks in minutes. You can create books for Nook, Kobo, iBooks Store, and Amazon. However you will need to install another tool – KindleGen – to produce the .mobi file.
The tool is fairly easy to use with multiple built-in styles that you can use for your eBook. However, this may not be the tool you will want to use for a fixed layout format needed for image heavy books.
Kinstant Formatter
Kinstant Formatter is not a writing or editing tool. You can use Microsoft Word or Open Office to create your book and upload the text file to Kinstant. The tool converts the text to HTML format and helps you publish books in different formats.
You can create a cover, Table of Contents and even edit the HTML code to fine-tune your eBook before going to the press. This tool is limited to digital publishing. If you intend to have a print version of the book, you will have to do all of the work again in a tool like InDesign or Quark Express or other similar software to make it print ready.
Atlantis Word Processor
Microsoft Word is sometimes unreliable, or may act funny when it comes to conversion. So if you belong to the anti-Microsoft camp, Atlantis Word Processor might be your tool of choice.
It could also prove useful if you do not want to get into the hassle of downloading software like Kinstant that helps you convert Word files to ePub and other eBook formats.
You can import your Word or RTF files into Atlantis Word Processor, make the edits you want and save the book to EBook formats like ePub.
All these tools are good and satisfy a specific need. Before you choose which tool you want to buy or learn, make sure that you clearly understand your requirements. If you are planning to write a bunch of fiction books, you don’t have to worry a lot about investing time and money in a high-end publishing software.
However, if your immediate strategy includes creating books that have pictures and charts, it might be worth spending time on learning a tool like InDesign that offers more flexibility.