I’ve been formatting books since January of 2012. Two and a half years! When I first started out there weren’t many ways to format an ebook. I learned by following a fantastic tutorial by Guido Henkel, but he taught how to format your book into HTML and then convert it into a mobi (for Kindle) and epub using Calibre.
I then found Paul Salvette who has fantastic instructions on how to format in HTML and then convert your book use KindleGen to create an mobi file and I’m not sure what he uses to convert it to epub, but you can be sure it’s something very techy because he believes in doing things “the right way”.
Well, finally, after trying nearly a dozen programs to convert my HTML files, I’ve found one that really does the trick well—Jutoh. Yes, it costs money, but $40 isn’t a lot to pay considering that I charge $50 to do it for you. J (That includes cleaning your document, standardizing your punctuation, converting it into HTML and then finishing the formatting in Jutoh.) What I hate to admit is that now, with Jutoh, you don’t even need to convert your document into HTML if you don’t want to (I’m slowly shifting over to not doing so for more straight forward books).
The thing is, with Jutoh, you can create beautiful ebooks with a minimum of fuss and even have it create different versions for the different vendors just by jumping through two additional hoops (it’s not difficult, truly). I’m going to be teaching my on-line self-publishing class (being offered at Savvy Authors March 2-15, 2015) the beauty of Jutoh and how to get it to do all the lovely things we’d like to see in our e-books. Yes, there are great tutorials out there on Youtube (this is a link to a very good one) and a book produced by the creator of Jutoh, Julian Smart (who is fantastic, by the way and will answer even the stupidest questions from users—I know, I’ve emailed him a number of times), but I think teaching Jutoh in a class where I can help people one-on-one will be helpful.
Are you interested in purchasing a copy of Jutoh for yourself? You can do so by following this link. And you can check out all of my books (many of which I formatted using Jutoh) here, or read more about my formatting services here.
Meredith Bond is an award-winning author of a series of traditionally published Regency romances and indie-published historical paranormal romances. Known for her characters “who slip readily into one’s heart”, Meredith’s romance novels include her new Medieval Fantasy series, the Children of Avalon, her Regency-set paranormal romances in the Storm series and traditional Regencies (without magic) in The Merry Men Quartet--the last one will be coming out in 2015. Meredith also teaches writing and publishing at her local community college. If you want a taste of her class in book form, Chapter One is available at your favorite e-retailer.
I then found Paul Salvette who has fantastic instructions on how to format in HTML and then convert your book use KindleGen to create an mobi file and I’m not sure what he uses to convert it to epub, but you can be sure it’s something very techy because he believes in doing things “the right way”.
Well, finally, after trying nearly a dozen programs to convert my HTML files, I’ve found one that really does the trick well—Jutoh. Yes, it costs money, but $40 isn’t a lot to pay considering that I charge $50 to do it for you. J (That includes cleaning your document, standardizing your punctuation, converting it into HTML and then finishing the formatting in Jutoh.) What I hate to admit is that now, with Jutoh, you don’t even need to convert your document into HTML if you don’t want to (I’m slowly shifting over to not doing so for more straight forward books).
The thing is, with Jutoh, you can create beautiful ebooks with a minimum of fuss and even have it create different versions for the different vendors just by jumping through two additional hoops (it’s not difficult, truly). I’m going to be teaching my on-line self-publishing class (being offered at Savvy Authors March 2-15, 2015) the beauty of Jutoh and how to get it to do all the lovely things we’d like to see in our e-books. Yes, there are great tutorials out there on Youtube (this is a link to a very good one) and a book produced by the creator of Jutoh, Julian Smart (who is fantastic, by the way and will answer even the stupidest questions from users—I know, I’ve emailed him a number of times), but I think teaching Jutoh in a class where I can help people one-on-one will be helpful.
Are you interested in purchasing a copy of Jutoh for yourself? You can do so by following this link. And you can check out all of my books (many of which I formatted using Jutoh) here, or read more about my formatting services here.
Meredith Bond is an award-winning author of a series of traditionally published Regency romances and indie-published historical paranormal romances. Known for her characters “who slip readily into one’s heart”, Meredith’s romance novels include her new Medieval Fantasy series, the Children of Avalon, her Regency-set paranormal romances in the Storm series and traditional Regencies (without magic) in The Merry Men Quartet--the last one will be coming out in 2015. Meredith also teaches writing and publishing at her local community college. If you want a taste of her class in book form, Chapter One is available at your favorite e-retailer.
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