Previously: A journalist’s guide to eBook publishing – part one

Thinking about your content is always the first step in publishing. But physically formatting your content will be the toughest step the first time you produce an eBook.

That’s why many services exist that will do all that work for you, for a fee. I’m not going to analyze or recommend any of those services today. Instead, I’m providing the cheapstake’s method to eBook publishing. These are the steps you can take to get your eBook published with the major eBook retailers, without having to pay anyone else a thing*.

*With one exception. And let’s start there.

You’ll need to buy an ISBN [International Standard Book Number] for your book. That means a trip, with credit card in hand, over to myidentifiers.com. Buying a single ISBN from the registry is outrageously expensive – $125 – but the price comes down significantly if you buy multiple ISBNs at once. Ten ISBNs will set you back $250, and 100 sell for $575. Go ahead and buy in bulk – once you get the hang of eBook publishing, it’s easy enough that you’ll want to keep publishing eBooks, and you will need a new ISBN for each.

Okay, there’s a second exception to the no-spending-money rule, but only if you’re ham-handed with graphic design. You’ll need an attractive cover for your eBook, one that in a single image will effectively communicate to your potential customers what your book is about and convince them to buy (or at least sample) the book. If you’re not confident in your ability to design such a cover, delegate or outsource this to someone who can. Don’t screw up your cover, because that represents your first and best chance to convert interest into sales.

Your coverage image should be 2×3 width-to-height ratio, at 300 dpi resolution. Don’t skimp on the resolution size. You want something that looks good to your readers when the open it for the first time in their eReader. Your customers’ first thought when they prepare to read your book never should be: “Oh, no, I paid money for this?” Go look at every cover in your eBook and printed book collections and decide if you’re up to this task.

With an ISBN and effective cover design in hand, you’re ready to begin formatting your book’s content. (We talked about creating and editing the book’s content in the previous entry, in case you missed that.)

When I started editing my first eBook, I made the mistake of copying all my webpages I wanted to include in the book into NeoOffice, then stripping the HTML coding, so that I could copy-edit in NeoOffice. Only when I finished, and prepared to format the copy for my eBook, did I learn that eBooks basically just are… HTML.

(Insert Homer Simpson forehead slap here: “D’oh!”)

The “source code” of your eBook document is nothing more than an HTML page, contained in an XML “wrapper.” But there are a few tricks that can fool you.

Be certain not to use any spaces or special characters in the file name of this HTML page, or of any file names of images or any other media that you embed within it, including your cover image. You can use any old file names that you wish – none of them determine the title of your book. If you do use spaces in any file names, however, this will come back to haunt you later! So don’t.

If your book is a collection of previously published Web content, I’d just paste the HTML of each article or post you’re including in the book into a single document, leaving out all the page headers, footers and other associated stuff you won’t be including in the book. If you must work in a word processing program – such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or NeoOffice – to copy-edit effectively, you’ll want to export an HTML version of that document once you’ve edited it, then go over that generated HTML by hand to edit out potential coding problems.

You’ll also need to place a copyright page in your eBook. I suggest placing this page at the end of the book, as the final “chapter.” Why? Most eBook retailers allow would-be buyers to download a certain percentage of the book as a sample, starting at the front of the book. That makes the front of your book a great sales tool. Don’t waste that valuable space with copyright notes, author biographies or other extra information. Stick those in the back of your book.

As for the specific format of your copyright page, just find a model you like in some other eBook and copy that. Remember to place your ISBN on your copyright page, too.

Don’t worry about a table of contents, either. That will be generated automatically for you later, provided you mark up your chapter titles correctly. More on that in a minute.

Once you have an HTML document and cover image, you will be using a variety of other programs and online tools to compile them into eBook formats. If there’s a problem with your HTML, the document won’t compile, and you’ll be stuck in the developer’s hell of trying to figure out which line of code is throwing the error. To avoid that fate, here are some notes to consider as you edit your HTML code:

Start each chapter with an <H1> tag heading, within which you will contain the chapter’s title. Only the chapter headings should use <H1> tags. You’ll instruct the compiling programs to look for those H1 tags when they generate your table of contents.

If you are using anchor tags for hyperlinks, especially internal links such as footnotes or endnotes, do not use ‘name’ attributes within the anchor tag. Use ‘id’ attributes instead. Auto-generated HTML from the word processing programs tend to use name attributes in <a href=””> and <img src=””> tags, and eBook compilers just choke on them.

Strip all the style attributes within your HTML mark-up in favor of declaring just the absolutely-essential style you need inside the head tag of the HTML document. This is just good HTML practice, but auto-generated HTML don’t always deliver that.

Finally, you’ll need to contain your HTML document within the XML “wrapper.” Open your HTML document with the following tags:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

Then don’t forget to close these tags at the end of the HTML document:

</html>
</xml>

With a completed XML/HTML “source document” in place, along with your cover image, you’re ready to begin building your eBook file. To do that for each of the major eBook retailers, you’ll need to download three pieces of software:

• Mobipocket Creator (PC only – I just used an old MS laptop I had in storage.)
• Calibre (If you get really lucky, you might be able to get away without this one.)
• iTunes Producer (Mac only – Yep, to be a cheapstake eBook producer you need to be bi-OS. You’ll first apply to be an Apple content producer, then proceed with downloading the software, once you are approved.)

I’ll show you want to do with those programs in part three.

Next: A journalist’s guide to eBook publishing – part three

Starting today, I’ll be bringing you a three-part series of instructions on how you can create your own eBook. Why an eBook? Because eBooks are one of the few online media where consumers have accepted widely a paid content revenue model, unlike on the Web itself. If you’re looking to diversify your revenue sources – and, as a journalist entrepreneur, you should be – paid content through eBook sales should be part of your business model.

Before I begin though, let’s remember that just because people are paying to buy eBooks online provides no guarantee that anyone will pay to buy your eBook. You’ll still need to find an information need and meet it with the content of your book, and support it with vigorous promotion to your target audience. Ebooks might have taken physical printing and distribution out of the publishing equation, but every other element of the publishing process remains. Overlook any of them, and you’ll find yourself wasting the time and money you do invest in your eBook publishing effort.

So let’s start in the same place that every book starts – with the concept. As a news publisher, you should have a wealth of content available to you from your existing work. But what of all that’s now on your website would someone pay to read as an eBook?

That’s the first question to ask yourself as you plan your eBook publishing strategy. My advice? Find the most beloved content on your site – the series, topic or writer that readers most often forward to others, copy and paste to other sites, and keep coming back to visit days, weeks and even years after it’s disappeared from your site’s front page.

In other words, find the type of stuff that people in past generations would have clipped out of the paper and saved for themselves. Think of the eBook as your collection of those clips, handily delivered to their eReader, smart phone, tablet or computer for a modest fee.

But merely assembling a collection of clips won’t be enough to unlock the full commercial potential of your work. Remember, you’re changing media here. Writing, editing and formatting that work best in a daily article or website post aren’t the same as those which work best in a book. Be prepared to put your work through a tough re-edit for the eBook edition.

Think about how you’ll organize your work for the eBook, in order to create the most compelling narrative for your readers. Do the items you are including best hold together chronologically, or thematically? Or is there a dramatic arc within the pieces that requires you to bend chronology and blend themes to allow that arc to emerge?

Remember also, as much as this might offend some journalists’ notions of objectivity, really great stories that resonate with audiences often require heroes and villains, too. While that’s not a requirement for popular narratives (you tell me the heroes and villains in a “Seinfeld” episode, for example), if heroes and villains are present in your narrative and your newsroom stubbornness is keeping you from allowing them those roles in the book, you are weakening the book for your audience.

Issue such as these are why it’s important to select a topic or theme for which you have an impressive amount of material. You might end up tossing quite a bit of what you thought you had because you discover that it doesn’t rise to the level of inclusion an eBook, after you’ve given it a fresh, hard read.

Do remember that in the eBook world, your content need not be plain text, or even just plain text and images. You can include video (within some restrictions) and hyperlinks within your eBook, too. Hyperlinking, especially internal hyperlinking to other sections of the book, can provide additional value to readers seeking additional detail or cross-references beyond what you could have provided in a traditionally linear book narrative.

You might have noticed at this point that I haven’t yet written much about eBook formatting or the technical details of eBook publishing. That’s because those don’t come into play until after you’ve spent many, many hours thinking about the subject of your book, then selecting, editing, writing and rewriting, producing and re-producing the material you will include within it.

I’ll write about the techie steps in my next piece. One tease: Those of you who learned to hard-code HTML are about to be rewarded.

Next: A journalist’s guide to eBook publishing – part two