Tag Archives: epub

a day in the life, Compilations, ePublishing, Random Thoughts

junk jettisoned, ebooks printed…and all’s well

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This is just a quickie…I know, I know, usually it takes a good couple of dates, some wining and dining, a few smiles, a hug, a kiss a cuddle…and then onto the final frontier…space…or at least what’s left of it aside from the junk we jettison out there as the ultimate chav planet in the galaxy…but more on that later.

(No, more on that now! Are those in charge of disposing of earth’s rubbish the same senseless oiks who dump old refrigerators in front of their homes on the off chance someone else wants it, or maybe the neighbours will get fed up enough – as I sometimes do – and clear it to the dump themselves? Seriously! If I was an alien race hell-bent on world domination, or just a friendly neighborhood alien race looking to drop in on the newbies and see how they are settling in, whether the kids have found school to be tough, or even just to borrow a few million gallons of oil, and I saw the rubbish floating around our planet by way of dead satellites, space waste, jettisoned rubbish and general debris that we humans have surrounded our planet with…well, I would think twice about visiting. Do you regularly go meet and greet neighbours who have old kitchen sinks dumped in their front gardens? Think about it! We could be missing out on the evolutionary-jump of a sentient race which thinks we are the chavs of the Milky Way…and we’ll never know…and now back to our regular broadcast…)

What was I on about? Oh, yes, I’ve published three compilations of, well, stuff from this blog as ebooks on Amazon – just search for ‘Emerson Freedman’ on amazon, or type in ‘Poemetics’…or even just click on one of the three links to those books on Amazon on the rigth hand side here…no not there…over to the…yeah…to the…to the right…your other right…yeah, there, the ‘Poemetics’, ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘Storytology’ links. Yup. Those. No, you can’t download them for free. They cost a whole £0.71. Not cause I’m greedy. Cause Amazon don’t do free ebooks. Go figure. Cheapest I could make them….no really…it was….whatever.

So, go on, have a look, download them, let me know what you think. Share them with a friend. This is the first foray into epublishing for me…the first ‘real’ epublishing books I created…by way of Word to Plain Text to Jutoh to Amazon…cool stuff, eh?

Let me know what you think. Feedback is always appreciated. Even if it is not precisely what I want to hear. (The truth is not always pretty, I know. But if you’re going to be honest, go easy…I am more fragile than I look!)

Til next time, bon nuit,

Em (mE)

ePublishing

ePub from MS Word – easy as 1-2-3, doh-ray-me…

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Hello all out there in blog post reading land.

This is just a quick blurb to let you know that, if you write your poetry, short stories, novels, screenplays or whatever it is you churn out, in Microsoft Word on a PC, you are not beholden to contact a charging “ePub creator” to turn your finished piece of writing into an ereader-friendly ebook.

The makers of the free ‘eCub’ conversion software, which takes plain text, HTML and other formatted documents, have created a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) conversion package called ‘Jutoh’. And at £24 it is a snip.

Getting down to brass tacks, the basic functionality of this software means that we neanderthal Word writers can simply ‘save as’ our novels in ‘plain text’ format, ensuring we choose ‘UTF-8’ encoding (I do not know what ‘UTF-8’ means – it is probably something like ‘Universal Text Format version 8’).

Then download and install the trial version of Jutoh from www.jutoh.com. (You do not have to buy it to create a trial eBook, although the trial puts ‘Created with Jutoh’ at the top of every chapter, obviously this is not the case with the full version.)

Next, open a new project in Jutoh, import your plain text file and cover art.

Then ‘convert’ to ePub or any other format you wish.

You can then change font, graphics, whatever.

It works – I created a version of a Word-based novel entitled ‘Scream’, which I wrote when I was 18, in 5 mins.

Jutoh also plugs into ‘Kindlegen’, Kindle’s own Kindle-friendly ebook generator.In other words, this is the one-stop-shop we need to publish to ebook format.

I have not tried this on a Mac – I have a mate who is trialling this on a Mac to see if it works (Jutoh should do as it is Linux friendly).

Yes, I know if I was willing to go out and pay double the price for a Mac as I did for my PC laptop, and if I were willing to convert (with difficulty) all of my many books, short stories and the rest to Apple’s own ‘Pages’ software, and if I was willing to retrain myself in using ‘Pages’ on a Mac after a lifetime of using Word on a PC, I could publish to ePub format from a Mac.

However I really do not have the money, time or inclination. I might buy a Mac when I have some spare cash. For now I’m a PC and Word type of dude. And for me, and the rest of my PC and Word type dudes and dudettes out there, Jutoh is just the tonic to take the pain out of publishing to eBooks.

Til next time, hang ten, stay safe,

And keep writing!

Peace,

Em (mE)

ePublishing

Percolating ePublishing’s Perfidious Parsimonious Platitudes…

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So what’s percolating in the coffee pot of my brain right now?

I did some research on the whole ePublishing thing. That’s ‘electronic Publishing’ for those of us who are just beginning to scratch the surface of this netherworld of blogs, twits (sorry tweets…why aren’t they called ‘twits’ instead of ‘tweets’? Either that or it should be called ‘tweeter’ instead of ‘twitter’…I am truly lost…), facebookers and the rest. Sure I am a techie yet I find that I have fallen behind the technology times every time I close my eyes…even if it is only for a short nap on the train to work in the morning!

Enough babbling, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

To publish a book online you need to use a standard format. ‘ePub’ seems to be the generally accepted standard, accepted by most (if not all) ebook online stores and native devices (iPads, iPhones, Sony e-Readers, Kindles etc).

To get a book into ePub format you can export from a main office application (Microsoft Office or OpenOffice) to a PDF format, then use something like Calibre’s free ePub software to convert that PDF to an ePub document.

Once you’ve got your document into ePub format, you need to sign up with an online bookstore. Here’s where it gets a bit hairy, because to make your ePub ebook…

  • Available on Apple’s iBookstore you have to be based in the good ole US of A (as iBookstore limits publications to US based authors) Or sign up with a Print on Demand self-publishing house which is linked to iBookstore such as lulu.com.
  • However, Lulu does not provide eBooks to Amazon, so if you want to have your eBook also available on Amazon, you then have to sign up with Amazon Kindle and re-publish your ePub on their site as well.
  • Also, if you do publish with Lulu, you will not be able to publish a free ebook because Lulu will not allow it – only chargeable books will be sent to be visible on iBookstore.
  • In other words, if you do not live in the United States of America and want to self-publish a free eBook on iBookstore, you cannot…unless
  • You were willing to forgo any decent formatting, graphics, cover art or any other artwork, were willing to have another company pasted all over your freebook and give up the right to be your own ‘publisher’ (hence the term ‘self-published’)…because then you could always go for ‘Feedbooks’…who provide…
  • An online form-based interface to ‘build’ your ebook online then publish it…Feedbooks sell themselves as a major free ebook supplier to Kindle, yet the licensing involved of your intellectual property is dubious at best, so I would not personally recommend it. This site is mostly for rehashed ‘public domain’ type literature or writing, not authors trying to get their work out there.

So there you have it, the basic steps involved in creating a standard ePub formatted eBook and publish on both the iBookstore and Amazon Kindle. (Ok, so we have not actually stepped through the whole formatting / conversion to ePub format…I’ll get to that later as I am still hammering through it myself…suffice it to say that it is not

Next time, maybe I’ll have some nitty gritty detail to go into about the engine-room level technical experience in creating and converting eBooks.

Til then, I hope you have loads of laughs and don’t choke on the residual spittle! 🙂

Yours truly,

Em