E-publishing a Novel - software?

Question

The book is written in MS Word, each chapter is a file. I am told there is another step or two I must take to massage the text format before it can be correctly offered online as an E-Book. It is science fiction (no surprise, huh?), so the opportunity to add illustrations would be helpful, but not as important as pouring this text into the right file format to be used fairly universally by the current technology.
If you know of a firm that permits me to autonomously publish through their system without giving them all the profits, lemme know.
I briefly went through the Answers offered by the category, but they were off the mark and so I asked.
Don't mind spending money for the right software. Thanks!

old lady · Accepted Answer

Depends on where you are posting it. If, for example, you are going to post your novel on Smashwords.com, they offer a 35-page guide that gives specific details on how the material must be formatted to work in their system. It's worth doing, because Smashwords supplies Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Sony and several others. The guide is free. But you don't need special software - Word works just fine.

Steven J Pemberton · Answer

Unless you've identified a specific publisher for your book, this question is meaningless. There are four or five common formats used for distributing ebooks, and maybe ten or fifteen more obscure ones.

You should worry about what format the publisher expects you to submit your work in. They'll deal with converting it to whatever formats they offer to the public. Most of them accept MS Word and/or Adobe PDF. PDF is probably better if you want precise control over the layout or you want any unusual fonts. You will almost certainly have to submit the book in one file - copy and paste all the chapters into a single file.

There are plugins for MS Word that will generate PDFs for you. I don't know how much they cost, or whether they're any good. I use OpenOffice for all my wordprocessing, which has a PDF converter built in. It's a free download from openoffice.org, and will read your MS Word files. It usually does a fairly good job of preserving the layout.

I read a lot of science fiction, and I don't recall the last time I read a sci-fi novel that had pictures, other than on the cover.

I don't know of any electronic publisher who keeps all the profits. Some self-publishing companies charge you so much up front that you can never make a profit, but that's not quite the same thing. Electronic publishing companies don't have up-front fees. When a reader wants to buy the book, the publisher charges them however much it costs and gives you some of the money. Therefore you can't lose money on the deal, because you never gave the publisher any money to begin with. But if you publish like this, instead of the traditional way, I'll be surprised if you earn enough to justify the time you spent writing the book.

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E-publishing a Novel - software?

2 Answers