How to Make an Ebook: Using Free Software

The book is available! My steps to creating your own ebook and putting them up for sales, in one volume you can reference on your ereader.

Want to create an ebook but don't know how? Don't have the cash to spend on programs to generate them? Author R. L. Copple shares his logical, step-by-step method of ebook creation. He begins with setting up the document to write your book, and ends with creating the cover art, the PDF, EPUB and MOBI ebooks, and then putting them up for sale at major online retail outlets. The appendices also describe how to make a PDB ebook and how to use the "nuclear" method to clean hidden formats in a document while retaining italics, bold, and heading formats. All using free software you can download!

The book breaks down the process into seven steps: Step 1 – Creating the Source File; Step 2 – Creating the Cover; Step 3 – Creating the PDF Ebook; Step 4 – Creating the Smashwords Edition; Step 5 – Creating the EPUB Ebook and Uploading to Barnes and Noble; Step 6 – Creating the MOBI Ebook and Uploading to Amazon; Step 7 – What to Do With the Ebooks.

How to Make an Ebook: Step 3 - Creating the PDF Ebook

This series will eventually become an ebook I'll make available for sale once we complete the chapters and I can make time to edit them. Visit the chapter list if you want to read the prior steps. If you appreciate my efforts and find them useful, please consider a donation (top, right) to aid the continued work on this book. Thank you.

Now that we have the text of the file properly formatted, and the cover ready to go, we are ready to start creating ebooks. The first one we want to work with is the standard ebook format, the PDF. The acronym stands for "Portable Document Format," and has become the most common way to share documents on the Internet. The cool thing about PDFs is they most closely resemble a printed book. That means they can usually display graphics and other elements that are generally harder for other ebook formats to handle. But that is also their downside as well. Because they are more "static" in format, they are harder to read on smaller devices like cell phones, and even on tablets are not ideal. Computer screens make the easiest reading device for these files.

But of all the formats, it is the one most anyone can open and read as the Adobe Reader software is free to download and the format is universally used across all platforms: Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It is hard to find someone who can't open a PDF file. Because of that, it is a good format to have on hand and sell from your website.

And even if you don't plan on creating a PDF ebook, you'll need to do some of the items in this step to prep your ebook for the rest. I'll let you know when to skip onto the next step.

How to Make an Ebook: Introduction

This series will eventually become an ebook I'll make available for sale once we complete the chapters and I can make time to edit them. If you appreciate my efforts and find them useful, please consider a donation (top, right) to aid the continued work on this book. Thank you.

As of this writing, it is obvious that ebooks will, at some point in the near future, overtake the sale of physical books. The trend accelerated during 2010, and all indications are that the movement has sped up to a road-runner pace during 2011. Publishers have been scrambling to lock down ebook rights on old contracts, while authors who retain those rights, have realized their old backlist is a new gold mine of potential income. More and more readers are buying ereaders like Amazon's Kindle, and Barnes and Noble's Nook, and the expectations for the future look bright for anyone who has hopped onto the ebook train.