Quote:
Originally Posted by seed_html
Essentially, I think most writers want to write in something even simpler than HTML, like we all do on the web. There's no reason writing for EPUB distribution can't be as simple as writing for wordpress, or whatever this forum software is.
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LO Writer or MS Word, especially with styles is simple. Only plain text is simpler and all the fragments of that can be trivially put into MS Word or LO Writer, and styled.
Then it's trivial to have an epub using Calibre, Sigil or other free tools.
The sort of interface this forum or Wordpress uses is inferior and harder as it's direct formatting rather than a template with styles that only needs set up once.
The two hard bits for self publishing are:
1) Writing decent content (you know the plot, characters, dialogue, narration, actions, places etc).
2) Marketing. Really, really hard.
An agent/trad-publisher is usually wanting an MS-Word doc, (which can be from LO Writer), though getting them to take an interest is very difficult.
Actually making an epub from a docx, then SP on Amazon, Draft2Digital (who now distribute to Amazon as well as Apple, Smashwords, Kobo, Barnes & Noble etc) and Google Playbooks (once you've done it once) is the easiest bit. Especially if proper styles & headings are used.
Edit:
Proofing / edit even after a 1st draft liked by Alpha Reader is far more difficult than making an epub. Many Writers doing SP need to hire someone to do that as it's a different skill & experience to writing.