Publishing Your Book: Preparing an ePub

In four previous posts, we discussed how to format your manuscript to prepare it for print, prepare it for ebook versions, design a cover, and have now published as a print copy through Createspace. The most difficult part is behind you! This post will describe how to prepare and your book for submission as Kindle and iBook versions. Here are the steps of the entire project (we are on #6):

If you have been working through the process outlined in the three previous posts, you should have two original Word files of your book: one for print (which you submitted to CreateSpace) and a ebook version of that same Word file. (To review how we prepared the eBook Word file, see the post on formatting for eBook.)
To submit this version of your book for Kindle and iBooks, these are the steps we will follow:

Export the book to ePub
Check the ePub
Design a eBook cover
Upload the ePub and cover to Kindle Direct, set parameters
Input file into iTunes Producer (sign up for Apple ID and iTunes Connect accounts if you have not already)
Upload the ePub and cover to iTunes/iBook store, set parameters

Export the book to ePub

There are many ways to do this. Here are Sulis we struggled with this—it is easy to get a Word file to ePub format, but it often fails the checks required to be a proper eBook for Kindle and iBooks (usually table of contents problems arise, but if you have footnotes, these can also be a nightmare.)

The easiest and cleanest way to do this us using the Pages app on Macintosh computer. If you have one, or have access to one, here are the steps.

Locate your Word file which was formatted for eBook. If it was not saved as a “.doc” file, open it in Word and save it in that format. “.docx” format will cause problems. Make sure that all of your chapter headings and subheadings are assigned to a Word style (heading 1, heading 2, or something like that). This should already be the case if you followed the procedure in Formatting for print and Formatting for eBook.
Open the file in Apple Pages and delete the entire Table of Contents. (You should not have any headers or footers, but delete them if they are there. An export to ePub will do this for you, however.) You can ignore any warnings that Pages displays (tables, fonts, backgrounds, etc.)
Open the format pane. Change all the headings for each chapter to “Heading 2” style in Pages. (You may already have it set this way.) The reason for this is that the ePub format uses a style called “Heading 2” to compile the eBook table of contents (You may see this referred to as NCX/Table of contents.) The easiest way to do this is to place the cursor with each chapter heading (or heading you want in the Table of Contents (and select “Heading 2” from the Style Menu).
From the File menu, export as an ePub.

If you do not have a Mac, there are other ways to do this, but we have not found any sure-fire ways that work as well. Older versions of Word (pre-docx) would export to ePub, but the newer ones do not. Here are the options we have used in the past.

First, you need to get the Word file to a clean HTML format. Here are some options:
- Save the Word file as HTML (use “Filtered HTML”). This will almost always cause problems.
- A better option is to open the Word file in Google Docs, then save to HTML from within Google Docs. This often has problems, but not as often.
Convert the HTML document to ePub. Here are some options:
- Download Calibre, click “Add books” and open your HTML file. Click “Edit metadata” and fill out the relevant information. Click “Convert books,” choose “ePub,” and then select “remove spacing between paragraphs.” Select the magic wand button to the right of “Level 1 TOC.” Select “h1” and click okay. Calibre will export the file to ePub format. We have had pretty good luck with this method, but footnotes do not usually work. Sometimes the Table of Contents does not work properly, or is missing items. (Here’s a brief video tutorial, click here.)
- Use Online-Convert and upload your HTML file for conversion. (It will also accept the “.doc” file format. This option had about the same success rate for us as using Calibre, but it is faster and easier.

If your ePub file does not pass the authentication checks (below) then you will need to go back to the eBook Word file and painstakingly reformat using the various Bookmark functions as we described in previous posts. If you are using a lot of footnotes, prepare for a long haul and mind-numbing work.
Good luck. If any readers know of an easier way to do this without using a Mac, please let us know in the comments section below.

Check the ePub

Now that you have your book in ePub format, you need to check its viability. This will save you problems later, and ensure that both Amazon and Apple will accept your book without problems.

Open your ePub file in the free app, Adobe Editions (Windows | Mac). This will give you a facsimile of what your book will look like on handhelds. Flip through you book, check the table of contents, footnotes, links, graphics, unwanted blank areas or page breaks, etc. Make sure everything works as it should.
Repeat the process using the Kindle app (Windows | Mac).
Repeat the process using iBooks if you have a Mac. If not, you can send the ePub to the iBooks app on an iPad or an iPhone (iPhone | iPad).

If it all looks the way you wish, and (more important) works the way an eBook should, you are ready for the next step. If not, then note the errors and go back to the Word or Pages file (depending on the problem) and fix them, then repeat the process.

Cover for the eBook

We previously covered designing a cover for your book in the post Cover design. If you have designed the cover yourself, then open the file in your graphics program, re-save it as “ebook cover” and alter the file to include only the front cover. If you hired a graphic designer, then have him or her do the same. If you used CreateSpace’s online version, it will be a bit more trouble. You can go to your project home on CreateSpace, open the Digital Previewer, zoom in on the front cover and open it as large as you can on your computer screen, then take a screen shot.
Make sure the cover is exported to a jpg at 1600 x 2400 which is somewhat of a standard and will work for both Kindle and Apple. Open the jpg in a viewing program to check the resolution.

Conclusion

Once you have a clean and proper ePub and a proper jpg of your cover, you are ready to upload both to Kindle Direct and the iBook store. We’ll cover that in our next post.
Sulis is available to help you with any of these stages—contact us from our home page or email us here.
As always, feel free to enter a comment or a question in the Comment field below this post.