Earlier this year I was finally ready to self-publish my first book, Hard Choices. I had used Scrivener for writing the manuscript and thought that the publishing process would involve a couple of clicks before uploading the appropriate file to Amazon. I was frustratingly disappointed.
First, let me say that Scrivener is great. I’ve used it for drafting, editing, and managing plot related notes and research data, and I love it. Unfortunately, I was so keen to use any available hours for actual writing, that I didn’t watch the tutorials, or spend time learning how to use the software and how to get the best from it. Coming from a computer programming background, I dived in, assuming I could pick it up as I went along.
To publish my book, I needed the manuscript in eBook format, ideally as a mobi file, the format recommended by Amazon. Using the Compile option in Scrivener, I converted the manuscript and viewed it on my Kindle. Unfortunately, some parts of the book did not display correctly, and selecting items from the Table of Contents often didn’t bring me to the correct page, especially the front and back matter sections (copyright, acknowledgements and author’s notes).
I’m not saying that Scrivener cannot generate the file correctly. Maybe it can. It’s a well designed, comprehensive piece of software. The main difficulty I encountered was understanding the compile process. I could not figure out which option or combination of options I should modify, so as to achieve the results I wanted. Often the changes that I made appeared to have no effect, or else fixed one issue while creating another. The help guides had proved invaluable for other aspects of the software but seemed very unclear when it came to compiling.
So I turned to Google. I searched and read and watched and listened. Several posts spoke of other software products which authors had used for compiling and marvelled at their simplicity and level of control. I wanted simplicity. I wanted control. I wanted my book on Amazon.
The most frequently mentioned product was Calibre. A quick look at their website and I was hooked. It seemed easy to use (doesn’t everything at the start), it was free, and I was desperate. Following other users’ advice, I created an ePub file in Scrivener and loaded it into Calibre. A few hours later, I was reading my beautifully compiled and perfectly formatted book on my Kindle Paperwhite, my Amazon Fire, and the Kindle app on both iOS and Android. Happy days.
Like Scrivener, Calibre is multifunctional. It is described on Wikipedia as a ‘software application suite which runs on multiple platforms, allows users to manage e-book collections as well as to create, edit, and read e-books’. Quite a mouthful. For me, it’s a holodeck where I can get under the hood of my book, spread the contents out and modify, add and remove whatever I need, then click a button to bundle it all into a presentable well-behaved eBook. If I break it, I can easily start again.
Calibre is widely used, so any challenges I faced were easily answered via a quick internet search. And secretly, the programmer in me enjoyed tweaking little bits of HTML, and seeing magic things happen.
Happy writing,
Harry
Resources mentioned in this post
Scrivener : A comprehensive authoring tool designed for writers.
Calibre : A software application suite for creating, editing, reading and converting e-books.
Wikipedia : Wikipedia article about Calibre.
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