E-book Formatting & Conversion

Presenters: Julie Klein and Marcella Van Oel

Day of Meeting: July 14, 2014

Presenter Bios:

Julie Klein is an editor and proofreader specializing in narrative nonfiction and fiction. She is excited to now offer e-book development to her colleagues and clients.

Marcella Van Oel has a background in web content production, including graphic design, blogging and community engagement via social media. She is taking on e-book formatting and publishing to coincide with the release of her book, Fallout from the Workforce, at the end of 2014.

The PDF of Julie and Marcella’s PowerPoint presentation: 2014.07.14_EbookPresentation

Presentation:

Julie outlined the evening’s presentation as being all about what’s “under the hood” in the mechanics of e-book publishing.

Julie’s venture began when she noticed that inquiries on the Northwest Independent Editors Guild listserv for help with e-book publishing were receiving replies with referrals to nonmembers. In January, she organized a series of meetings for Editors Guild members interested in learning more about e-book publishing. With Guild member Bob Sheldon’s generous help, the group worked through the formatting required to upload two books to Smashwords and the MOBI publishing platform.

Julie briefly discussed her discovery of the differences between and limitations of varying e-publishing platforms. She and Marcella both realized that they had only just begun to scratch the surface through the Smashwords publishing experience and since April, they’ve been throwing themselves into learning the coding and formatting requirements for most e-publishing platforms, using Paul Salvette’s “The eBook Design and Development Guide,” which Julie strongly recommends.

Marcella then gave the audience an overview of key technical steps that she and Julie slogged through on their road to successfully uploading a book from scratch (without help of third-party software) for both the ePub and MOBI platforms. She outlined a list of best practices to follow in the process and a seven-point final quality checklist before attempting to publish. (For details, see PowerPoint link provided above.)

Marcella said that it was a significant moment receiving the “Congratulations, your code is valid” message from International Digital Publishing Forum’s (IDPF) code validation process. She referred to IDPF as “the Holy Grail” for digital publishing conversion.

Marcella stressed that a successful e-publishing product all comes down to having beautifully formatted HTML and great style sheets (CSS). Her advice was that if you want to have as full control as possible over your finished product and how it appears from device to device, learning to work with the code is essential. Working “under the hood” is about having creative control, being your own gatekeeper in a publishing world where production quality can be otherwise erratic.

(Two recommended authors, although each takes an opposite approach to e-publishing, are Paul Salvette and Liz Castro.)

Notetaker: Kathleen Walker

Location: Good Shepherd Center, iLEAP East Hall, 4649 Sunnyside Avenue N., Seattle, Washington