From the beginning ........ - Page 2

lindsayw · 10-10-2011, 11:05 AM

Ben is right that knowledge of html is an essential skill today. Your work is going to be read on an eReader device or App, so it is YOUR job to ensure that it presents as well as possible. As an author you have to do what the Typesetter used to do in the days of dead-tree books. That means knowing how to format content using css and xhtml. For novelists that is not so hard – you need good paragraph styling and chapter headings but not much more than that, so it isn't hard to learn. Experience with website html is helpful, but eBooks are a bit different, since re-flowable content is paramount. I write my drafts in Word, then MANUALLY cut-&-paste into an html editor so that I can control every facet of presentation. Once into html, all further editing is done there. I use Anthemion eCub to take the html chapter files and make an ePub, then Calibre to "explode" it and check individual files before rebuilding it. Also ePub 1.2 Validating (you can do that online) finds errors that are hard to spot otherwise.

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10-10-2011, 11:05 AM	#16
lindsayw Author from pBook days Posts: 49 Karma: 10782 Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: Australia Device: Kindle-3-Keyboard; 8" Android Tablet	Ben is right that knowledge of html is an essential skill today. Your work is going to be read on an eReader device or App, so it is YOUR job to ensure that it presents as well as possible. As an author you have to do what the Typesetter used to do in the days of dead-tree books. That means knowing how to format content using css and xhtml. For novelists that is not so hard – you need good paragraph styling and chapter headings but not much more than that, so it isn't hard to learn. Experience with website html is helpful, but eBooks are a bit different, since re-flowable content is paramount. I write my drafts in Word, then MANUALLY cut-&-paste into an html editor so that I can control every facet of presentation. Once into html, all further editing is done there. I use Anthemion eCub to take the html chapter files and make an ePub, then Calibre to "explode" it and check individual files before rebuilding it. Also ePub 1.2 Validating (you can do that online) finds errors that are hard to spot otherwise.