Great info, thanks gmw for such a detailed answer. Yes, it is a more complex manuscript as it is a 12 week life coaching course. I've had in in PDF format with links to you-tube videos and it has worked really well. Obviously I'm new to the epub world and it is a big learning curve. I got the conversion done on fiverr so it was good for the price, just not what I imagined. Looks like I'll have to invest some more time into working this one out so that I can keep in budget
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Originally Posted by gmw
crich70's advice is good, Sigil can be very helpful. There's lots to learn, so you will have lots to love! 
You say "had a book that I'd written converted to epub" - which implies you used a third party service. If so, and if it was a paid service, then you have a right to expect some reasonable quality in what they produced.
Of course, some manuscripts can be very complicated and many services aren't really geared to cope (it's one thing to offer to create an epub for a typical fiction novel, it's quite another to do it for a text book with images and references and so on). A lot will also depend on the starting point (what was given as the source for conversion), and how carefully that was prepared.
If your book is, in format terms, comparable to most fiction novels and the source is in MS-Word/OpenOffice/LibreOffice, then tools exist to help you automatically generate an EPUB for yourself which can subsequently tidied up in Sigil. To do this effectively will mean learning some basics about styles (*Office and CSS) and HTML. Most of this is not difficult (at the fiction novel format level), but if you want to do it yourself you must be prepared to spend the time.
Any book more complex than a fiction novel is probably best given to a (reputable) third party that knows what they are doing. It may not be cheap, but getting a reliable EPUB for complex layouts takes experience.
ETA: I forgot to reference your questions:
"- do links work in epub? Mine don't seem to at the moment"
Depends partly on the ereader and partly on what you're linking and partly on the quality of the conversion process.
"- Should I just put everything into the same font and font size?"
This question implies that you have not learned how to use styles effectively (or your editor doesn't support them). Styles are very important critical if you want a good EPUB.
"- Is there anyway to keep certain aspects together? For example if I have a quote I would like it all to show on the same page and not be split up?"
This suggests a complex layout. Yes, there may be ways to achieve this (within reason, and exactly how the result is presented will depend on support at the ereader), but you are getting into more complex areas of CSS and HTML. This is where experience really starts to count. |