Reverse Engineering ePubs

When you publish an ebook, you should study what others have done. There are some serious adults out there who can do some marvelous things in ebook design. And when you try to do the same, it can end up looking lame. The way to save yourself from looking lame is to learn what the serious adults did and so something similar.

I am a firm dis-believer in DRM. I think it is the tool of the devil and I will never willingly use DRM in anything that I publish. Moreover, DRM is something that one can easily defeat with just a fair amount of Googling. I mention DRM not because I want a flame war but to explain why you might not be able to reverse engineer some of the smart-kids' ebook designs. If you try to study an ebook that's DRM encrypted, you'll have to first defeat the encryption.

I think the great strength of Sigil is how well it works at opening up an existing ebook and showing you its structure. Sigil reads and writes ePub files. But what if the ebook you want to study is in MOBI (Kindle) format. Not to worry. Load the ebook into Calibre and ask it to convert from MOBI into ePub. You do use Calibre to manage all your ebooks, don't you? I've even heard rumors that those sneaky Russians have a way to circumvent DRM with a Calibre plug-in.

Once you have an ebook unencumbered by DRM, open the ebook's ePub file in Sigil and look around. You'll see a table of contents, a cover, content, and metadata. Take notes of what you see.

For instance, study the copyright page of your ebook. How can you make yours look cool and professional? What Tor Science Fiction did was to create an image of exactly the right size and on this image they put text and line-art consisting of the requisite info in the perfect typeface and size. Good idea. I can do the same in my ebook's typeface with my ebook's text.

How about the metadata for your ebook? What should you put in? Grab two or three other ebooks and look at what those guys included. Just make sure that your exemplars should be comparable to your own ebook. If you're making a cookbook, don't study a thriller's metadata. And if you're making a thriller, don't glom onto a cookbook's metadata.

Pay attention to the sequence that the other guys used to organize their ebooks. Do you really need to put the Table of Contents at the front of the ebook? Or the title page? Often times people will look at the excerpt at the front of your work. You don't want this clotted up with a bunch of non-prose that doesn't help the reader toward a buying decision.

Do your chapters have titles that look like "Chapter One" or "The Adventure Begins"? Which do you want to appear in your Table of Contents? What did someone smarter than you do in a similar circumstance?

If you see an ebook that looks amateurish, notice what it is that makes it look that way. Then look at a professional ebook to find out how it creates the opposite impression. Usually, when I see an ebook that looks amateurish, it doesn't have a snazzy enough cover. This is why I prefer to hire out cover design.

The main thing you want to do from this step is to build up checklists of things you don't want to forget to put in your ebook, and to raise questions for which you need to research the answers you'll need later.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Copy HTML into Sigil

This is the third step in my multi-step tutorial on how to publish an ebook.

I use Sigil. You can find it here. It is free. You can download Sigil and soon be generating ePub files to publish. I spent about a day learning how to use it.

One of the good things about Sigil is that it'll read pretty much any unencrypted ePub file. If you see someone else's ebook and wonder, "How'd s/he do that?" You can use Sigil to reverse-engineer it. I'll talk more about that later.

For now, let's just stick with the basics. After you download Sigil and read its online documentation--or skim it at least. You should run it on your machine. It'll look something like this:

 

Now, get the HTML files you converted in the last step of this process. Click on that little blue cross on the toolbar and that will enable you to add your HTML files to the project. Put them in the folder marked Text.

You may have some images that your ebook uses. You have to copy them into the Images folder. Use the right-click pop up menu. If you have a lot of images, this can get involved.

 

If you have images like this, then you have to go into the HTML markup and change the locations to point inside the epub file. (If you're confused, don't try to grok this in one go. Just take this as a placeholder for something you have to learn to do, or hire out to a teenager.)

That's it for now. If you are serious about doing this, you should not regard this tutorial as anything more than a roadmap. You should spend the next few hours reading the Sigil documentation. It's not particularly hard, and if you know what you're doing, you can probably figure things out for yourself.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

How To Publish An Ebook

A couple weeks ago a friend of mine at writers' group asked about publishing an ebook. Since I've published The Aristotelian and also Finding Time, I've worked out a workflow for ebook creation. Last summer I gave a presentation at Bar Camp Grand Rapids and that was well received.

I did not use a fancy Power Point or Prezi presentation--just a text file zoomed up and projected on the screen. This is what it said:

1) Write a book. Use Word, or Emacs. If you use vi, you can't. Just quit...
2) Convert DOCX to HTML using Rick Boatright's script
3) Copy HTML into Sigil.
4) Create a snazzy cover with a pretty girl.
5) Open someone else's ebook in Sigil to see how they did it
6) Convert ePub to Mobi using Calibre.
7) Go to the County clerk and register a DBA, e.g. Atlas Integrated Publishing
8) Buy an ISBN or 10 ISBNs
9) Create an account on Kindle Direct Publishing
10) From your Bookshelf add a new title
11) Wait 12 hours for notification from Amazon.
12) After you sell 100 books, look into CreateSpace
13) Build a web page for your book
14) Create a snazzy book trailer
15) Create marketing pieces. Like bookmarks or business cards

About a week later, another friend, Matt Heusser, wrote this summary of my talk. I should apologize for step #4, because a snazzy cover may also have a pretty guy, or a pretty guy and girl. Or a puppy.

Coming back to now, my friend wanted this done for his book. I told him that the first thing he has to do (mindful of the above), is to decide what you want to do and what you want to hire out. I feel pretty handy with the geeky stuff and I feel pretty lame with the artsy stuff. That's why I hired my friend Joanne Renaud to do the artwork. And my friend Kemp Lyons to do the book trailer.

In both cases I was able to take delivery of content online and I was able to pay via PayPal. We're all still talking to one another, and I'll gladly do business with each of them again. I'll call that success. The more you can iron out up front, the less risk of hard feelings later. It's not reasonable to expect the other person to read your mind. Both of you should expect a bit of to-and-fro while you're converging on a solution. I hope to expand on this later.