[Pulpmeister]

I have been producing ebooks for some years now, around 600 so far, and I have steadily simplified the process. This is how I do it now.

Step 1 is to make a straightforward Word document, with no complications and no "styles". It's in 14 pt Calibri just because I like that screen font and use it all the time.

At the top is a jpg image of the cover, 550-600 pixels wide (nothing larger is needed for an e-reader). I do them in colour even though my kindle is monochrome. That's because I use Calibre as a data base, and that uses colour. So do MobileRead library uploads.

Then comes the title, in 26 pt bold caps, then author's name in 20 point lower case bold; then date of first publication in 14 pt.

Then contents. The side-by-side contents layout I use is intended to keep the contents on one kindle screen if possible, and I didn't invent it. I saw it some years ago, and copied it.

Then the book's text. Just straight text, double space at end of chapter; chapter number in 14 pt bold, and if there is a chapter title, its below in 14 pt italic, then another double space. Again, no "style"; just do it by hand.

It finishes up looking like this screen grab of the first two pages of a Word doc of a recent book: (click on the thumbnail below at the foot of the post. It will enlarge).

I save this file and keep it.

This is then converted to html using the "save as web page filtered" option. For some reason, Word promptly converts the jpeg to a smaller png in the process. (Not to mention all in-text images such as maps, frontispiece etc). I dislike png reproduction.

I then use a freeware basic html editor called KompoZer, and I take out the png images and replace them with the original jpgs. I also use KompoZer to manually make the chapter links. Again, no style sheet. I can't see the point of a style sheet for a novel or short stories, and style sheets sometimes conflict with ereader internal systems to produce odd results.

Once I'm happy with the html, I import it into Calibre, and convert it to epub, azw3 and mobi. Doing this adds the cover to the e-books, and also the blurb which I write into it in Calibre.

A few quirks:

This way you get 2 "covers"; the cover which I put at the top of the original file, and the cover generated by Calibre. I do this for a reason; I take it for granted that some people will want to improve on, or re-format, or whatever, anything I do, and appreciate being able to pull out the original html and have a reasonable jpeg of the cover right there. It also means that I have the jpeg of the cover right there with my original word file, not stashed away in a different folder full of book covers, although i have it there was well.

With short stories, I always put a centred underline between stories, just to mark the fact that the story has ended.

When uploading short story collections/anthologies I always put the contents (title/author) in the post itself, and a copy (yet another copy!) of the cover, which appears as a thumbnail but enlarges, so browsers can look at the cover, and the contents, before making a decision.

I mostly write the "blurbs" myself. When I can't find a decent first edition cover, or indeed any cover at all, I create one. I try to have my own cover more or less appropriate to the book's period or content.

So the final book is dragged through three software programmes (Word, KompoZer and Calibre) before being uploaded. Not a perfect system, but it works for me.

The "Past Masters" series of anthologies I have been producing pose their own difficulties. The source is mostly on-line automatic OCRs of newspaper pages, and the quality of the OCR varies from mediocre to atrocious. A lot of hand-correcting of the text is needed, and since I get bored easily when doing it, OCR bloopers will always slip through. Specially if the errors are words in their own right, eg "die" when "the" is required, etc. You do get inconsistencies, such as some stories using single quotes, some double quotes, and some curly quotes. I don't try to standardise them, as it would involve an enormous load of hand-work.