Intro and request for help

[Heydon]

I'll give my intro and issues first. This may be too much detail for the forum, but I'm thinking that the more details, the more chance someone else has shared the same experience.

----------------------------------------------------

My name is Heydon, and I've just finished writing a book about World War II. My plan is to first publish it as an ebook. I'm completely new to online publishing, and my computer usage is currently limited to a desktop and a laptop. My principal issue here is learning to combine and convert my .doc or pdf files to mobi or epub or whatever other conversion I might need to make the book available online. Looking into epublishing, I learned that I'll have to convert my files. Further, I read that calibre software is good for doing this. Coming to the calibre site led me to this forum.

I wrote the book on my desktop. It's an older system with Windows Vista as OS, and my software is MS Word 2002. My 32 chapters are set up as individual .doc files with footers for each chapter starting as page 1.

At some point, I need to combine the chapters/files and make numbering sequential throughout the manuscript. Should I do that before converting the files to epub format?

I set up the chapters on an 8.5x11 layout with 1" margins on top, bottom, and sides. I have a lot of images in the chapters so I imagine it will be difficult to convert the manuscript to a simple epub format. I've read that most epublishers won't print pdf format, but a book with many images (e.g., a cookbook) is difficult to arrange otherwise as page breaks are already established in the fixed layout specs. Does anyone know about this?

Beyond the writing, I've already designed the book cover, chose my fonts and sizes, and page breaks. It's pretty much print ready if I were to print a paper copy at 8.5x11. However, to epub is a different matter and would require reworking for different size devices. This is especially true for the images.

My first choice would be to publish the manuscript as its current size and layout, but I don't know if any online pubishers just accept pdf or doc files.

I better stop for now. Any suggestions are appreciated.

[Cinisajoy]

Hi, welcome. Now here are some tips although I hope a mod moves this to the writer's forum.
You want to be an author, you want to sell ebooks. Go buy an ereader. This way you will know how they work.
Now whatever you do, do NOT upload a pdf.
What you want to do is make sure it has reflowable text and font for ereaders.
If you set the layout exactly as it is on your computer, it will look like crap on any other device.
Now if you want to sell only the paper version, your idea will work.

How do you plan to sell your book?
Do you have a good cover?
Have you had it proofread?
Did you invest anything in your book?

Oh: if this is a cookbook, they are a hard sell.

[Dr. Drib]

Welcome to Mobileread.

Since this is the Introduce Yourself Form - a place for new members to introduce themselves to other members - Mobileread encourages new members with technical questions to visit our site so that they can become familiar with how the forums are organized.

Please look around our site and post your question(s) in the appropriate technical forum.

If you cannot find what you are looking for, please PM one of the Moderators.


Don
(Moderator)