eBook Creation and Publishing

Welcome to the Age of eBooks. eBooks aren’t new of course; tech­ni­cal­ly they’ve been around since the first com­put­er ReadMe.txt file was writ­ten in the 1960s. And Project Gutenberg has been dis­trib­ut­ing clas­sic nov­els in var­i­ous ebook for­mats since the mid-90s. Not until 2010, how­ev­er, did ebooks cap­ture a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the book pub­lish­ing indus­try. Now they account for near­ly half of all book sales, whether fic­tion, non-fiction, poet­ry, pic­ture books, or text­book, and ebooks of all gen­res are gain­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty month after month.

And it’s not only the acces­si­bil­i­ty and low price point of ebooks and ebook read­ers that are dri­ving the for­mat’s rapid and wide­spread adop­tion. The oth­er side of the equa­tion is just as sig­nif­i­cant: eBooks have a $0 upfront cost to creators.

For pub­lish­ers this means the immense costs of print­ing, ship­ping, and unit ware­hous­ing is com­plete­ly elim­i­nat­ed. Even dis­tri­b­u­tion roy­al­ties paid to Amazon, the iBookStore, and oth­er ebook sell­ers are less than are typ­i­cal­ly paid to brick-and-mortar book­stores and dis­tri­b­u­tion channels.

For authors, the elim­i­na­tion of all costs asso­ci­at­ed with pub­lish­ing, list­ing, and dis­trib­ut­ing ebooks means that all the bar­ri­ers to self-publishing have been removed. No pub­lish­er is required. No agent is required. There are no mid­dle­men; just authors and ebook sellers–the ebook sell­ers even take care of pay­ment pro­cess­ing and fulfillment.

This course opens the doors onto ebook pub­lish­ing for…

  • Book pub­lish­ers ready to inte­grate ebook pro­duc­tion into their print­ed book pro­duc­tion workflows.
  • Authors and would-be authors ready to take the sur­pris­ing­ly easy leap into self-publishing for fun and profit.
  • Designers and pro­duc­tion hous­es ready to cap­ture a piece of the $3 bil­lion annu­al ebook design and pro­duc­tion business.

In this hands-on course we’ll start with a typ­i­cal man­u­script and move start to fin­ish through to putting it up for sale (or stop­ping just shy of putting it up for sale if you like) as a pro­fes­sion­al­ly pro­duced, platform-optimized ebook. You will learn:

  • How to pre­pare a man­u­script for epub­li­ca­tion in a word proces­sor (e.g. Microsoft Word or Apple Pages).
  • Creating and using appro­pri­ate para­graph and char­ac­ter styles
  • Repurposing for-print text to ebook
  • (Optional) How to lay­out an ebook man­u­script in InDesign.
  • (Optional) How to lay­out an ebook man­u­script in QuarkXPress.
  • Creating the ini­tial ebook.
  • Unique require­ments for pho­tos, fig­ures, illus­tra­tions, and cap­tions in eBooks
  • How to pre­pare images in Photoshop and Illustrator
  • Creating ebook cov­er images
  • Exporting ebooks from lay­out and word pro­cess­ing applications
  • What’s inside that ePUB file
  • Creating multi-chapter ebooks
  • Obtaining an ISBN num­ber for books
  • Getting your e‑publication into iBooks, Amazon​.com, Barnes & Noble, and oth­er e‑tailers