Creating e-books: Gather your “materials”

January 5, 2009 | 4 Comments

I want to make something very clear. What I’m doing is giving you the tools to create e-books from scratch with very little money and not a lot of automation. There’s a reason for this: When you learn it this way, you learn principles you can carry with you to other projects. [...]

Dec

30

Creating e-books: The easy way

December 30, 2008 | 1 Comment

I AM AGAINST DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (DRM). ANY VENDOR I RECOMMEND WILL SHARE THIS STANCE AND ANY INSTRUCTIONS I GIVE WILL IGNORE ANY POSSIBILITY FOR ENCRYPTION. IF YOU WANT TO LOCK UP YOUR WORK, FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF.

In my last episode, I instructed you to go learn (X)HTML/CSS. I was gently taken to task [...]

Dec

29

A rose by any other name

December 29, 2008 | 10 Comments

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the definition of a “book,” or more specifically, the proper formatting of an e-book, and the definition of a “page” and its importance in the New eWorld Order.
I’m here to tell you: Unless it’s on paper or in PDF, they ain’t no such thing as a [...]

Dec

20

Creating e-books

December 20, 2008 | 7 Comments

Note: I cross-posted this on Publishing Renaissance on December 24, 2008.
I’ve been thinking about offering a quick’n’dirty series on how to create various ebook formats, wondering if independent publishers (or even micro- and small presses) know how to disseminate their wares effectively in electronic format. I know PDF is the fallback position and while [...]

Dec

4

Book Review: The Truth About Roxy

December 4, 2008 | 5 Comments

The Truth About Roxy
by Jenny Gilliam
published by The Wild Rose Press
I like the longer single-title contemporary romance (no suspense, thanks, and the category lengths are just way too short) and lately, the ones I really like have been coming out of the smaller e-presses. They’re not as well edited as I’d like, but they’re [...]

Dec

1

My way or the highway

December 1, 2008 | 10 Comments

Lately I’ve been reading a snowballing number of posts in the ebook community about adopting EPUB as the international (and pleasepleaseplease DRM-free) standard. This is great and I’m SOOO on board with that. What’s got me disturbed is that the subtext (and sometimes it’s not even that subtle) is that in order to adopt [...]

Nov

26

Make it easy on the customer

November 26, 2008 | 19 Comments

There’s a book I really really really want to read. However, it’s only available in e-format 2 ways: Serialized on the author’s blog (i.e., on the computer—no thanks) and via Kindle (no thanks). Now, I’m getting ready to email him and ask him if it’s available any other way, so we shall [...]

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