I took a few minutes today draft an .epub version for Suns Go Dark's most recent draft. I didn't decide to create an .epub file right out of the gate. That was what I ended up creating after exploring my options online for a moment.
More on that further down.
I had been idle for too long. This is good and bad for writing. Per Stephen King in his fantastic semi-autobiography / creative method guidebook On Writing, he always builds in a 6-month phase for a manuscript to sit in a drawer. He writes it. Then he lets it rest. Then he reads it again to see if it still entertains or surprises him.
Every time I re-read Suns Go Dark after letting it rest, it alarms me how much I enjoy it.
In 2014, I crafted the "final" draft of The Diffused States of America in a file compatible with e-readers. It read like a book, straight out of the Amazon Kindle app on my Nexus 7 tablet. It felt good to have it sit beside the other novels on the reader app's carousel with the trashy cover art.
I had not undergone this exercise since. I had not read Suns Go Dark anywhere besides a computer monitor. I was compelled by anxiety. Sometimes that's all it takes to get a writer going.
How To Load A Self-Published eBook Onto An E-Reader Like Kindle Or Google Play Books
I retained most of my knowledge on how an ebook is lashed together. In short, it doesn't take much to have a file be compatible with the e-reader apps on your phone or tablet.
The most popular app is Kindle. Because it's popular, it's also a garbage dump user-experience to get your work to even properly display on the Kindle app.
Here's the skinny:
- There are tons of e-reader file formats, I focused on .epub and .mobi
- Starting at clueless, I turned a 4000 word short story held in Evernote into a file compatible with multiple e-reader apps in about 30 minutes
- Requires:
- HTML knowledge
- A Notepad tool (Notepad, Notepad++, Wordwrangler, SublimeText)
- .epub maker tool (Sigil, free)
The two formats were .epub and .mobi. They are identical in capability. Kindle only accepts .mobi files while .epub is more universal. It works on Google Play Books. I need to test it on Nook.
At its core, an e-reader file / ebook that you might read on Kindle is just a pile of HTML. I used the program Sigil to create the .epub file.
First, I removed the formatting on the story that was left over from being written in Evernote with a quick copy-paste in and out of Notepad++. Then, I auto-formatted it to remove the <br> tags between lines, replacing them with actual <p> paragraph formatting. From there, I moved it back into Notepad++ to double-check the formatting in the script.
VITAL: I added opening and closing <body> tags before saving the file in Notepad++ as an .html file. This is easy to forget. The eventual .epub file won't save without it.
Once that was done, I opened the .html file containing the story with Sigil. Then I added the cover art into the image folder in Sigil. It took a little searching to discover how to designate it as cover art (uh, right click on the image file, set it as cover art).
Last, I updated the file's metadata in the Sigil menu, giving it a title and an author.
Save the file. Done. It's now an .epub.
To get this file to the device I wanted to read it on, it's a simple drag-and-drop into a file sharing tool. I used Google Drive, Dropbox or anything like it would work. I just needed to be able to access this storage on your phone / table / reading device.
Accessing the .epub file in my Google Drive on my phone, it instantly downloaded it, added it to Google Play Books, and synced it across all other devices that used the app.
That's all it took.
Converting the .epub to .mobi for it to be compatible with Kindle is a few more steps.
- Convert the file using an online tool is the easiest
- After that, the Send To Kindle app for desktop comes into play, which, uh, sends compatible files like .mobi or .pdf to a Kindle account / device
- Then the file should be readable on the Kindle
It's more trouble. I don't like the Kindle app compared to others. The carousel UI and the black and orange color scheme makes it feel like I've fallen asleep inside a mailbox.
-- @Alex_Crumb
