I just published my first eBook!
Stepping up to the plate, and into the 21st century, I have published my book "Behind the Paint - Italy 2011" as an electronic book, available through Amazon.com. I got the free book from Amazon "Building Your Book for Kindle", read it over a few times, 36 pages, and it sounded pretty straight forward. Only takes 5 minutes.
Well, four tries and 2 days later I was finished and the ebook was up on Amazon.
My problem was that I set up the book to be printed in a publishing software, not Word. So, I had to copy and paste all of the formatted text from the publishing software into Word, which stripped all of the formatting of headlines, paragraphs and captions and photos. It was dropped into Word as just text, except the images, which did not come across.
Next, I set up the formats in Word as per Kindle's specs, it took several minutes, and then go through each line making sure it was correct. Then I had to import all of the photos and redo all of the captions again.
When that was done, I uploaded the files to Amazon, quite simple really, and checked the previewer. Did not look quite right, so I revised it several times, until I was happy.
If you are a normal author, you write in Word and you don't have photos, and making an eBook is a piece of cake. If you are an artist and a graphic designer, and your book is photo heavy, well, it just takes a bit longer.
I do plan on publishing all of my books as eBooks, slick once I understand now how it will work.
So look forward to two more eBooks in the next few months, and I am editing my fourth book of the "Behind the Paint" series, it is on five National Parks, and I have started to write my fifth book, "Behind the Bronze" a series of stories and photos of my sculpture. Books four and five in paperback first, then eBooks.
