My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

Great review. I was not aware of Bookshop, thanks for sharing your deep-dive into using it and other tools.

I began writing ebooks over the summer. To date, I have written four educational/reference titles around a theme -- "In 30 Minutes". The idea is to let newbies quickly understand a mildly complex topic. The most recent title is The $10 Small Business Website In 30 Minutes (1).

Not only do these books contain lots of screenshots and detailed TOCs, I also publish them in multiple formats -- .mobi, ePub, PDF, and PDF for paperback.

Unfortunately, I discovered that the most popular writing tools -- Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Apple Pages, are not up to the task of creating ebook files across all of the platforms. Even if they can export to a certain format, there are limitations that force additional production and conversion steps. I also encountered the problem of forked masters, when I had to use different tools for exporting/converting to special formats.

Currently, I am using Google Docs for composition and collaboration with my copy editor. I then copy and paste the text into Scrivener (2), which is the most powerful writing and publishing tool I have ever used. It exports to .mobi, ePub, PDF, and print book PDF. Like TFA, I use Kindle Previewer to test the .mobi files. The ePub files need some mild HTML cleanup, which I do in Sigil (3).

1. http://10dollarsmallbusinesswebsite.com/

2: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

3: http://code.google.com/p/sigil/

Thanks for sharing this info.

As a Python developer and ebook writer I've gone a similar route. I'm currently writing in emacs using reStructuredText as my base format and have written code to generate [0] clean epubs which translate to mobi/kf8 pretty well. Part of this is a CSS file I'm working on [1] to make common formatting "just work" across the big ebook readers (old-kindles, newer kindles, ipads, nook and kobo).

I've spent a little bit of time (and money) getting very nice pdf generation working using sphinx and the memoir class for latex. It's not there yet as I've been focusing on the ebooks.

Yes, it feels like you need to be a programmer to create ebooks right now. You definitely need to feel comfortable editing html and css. I'm not completely happy with rst as the base format, but I don't think there is another lightweight markup language specifically targeted to authoring books. Even sphinx which is supposed to be for documentation isn't really well suited towards books. So there's little hacks here and there. Plus as I usually write about Python related material, rst lets me "test" my books using doctest and I can even templatize some stuff (I'm doing that in a book I'm currently working on).

0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2

1 - https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit

I've published some children's fiction this year, but I suspect I will publish programming works again at some point.

I'll give another plug for Scrivener[1], which is really a great tool. All of the editions that I have in the major online bookstores come straight out of Scrivener (though I obviously used an image editor for the covers).

I wanted to also mention out awesome Leanpub[2] is. Write your files in Markdown (and they support code snippets well... definitely a service that works well for software topics), save them in Dropbox. Press a couple of buttons in your browser and you've got PDF, mobi and epub. And, you can sell right away and keep 90% - 50 cents. They make it easy to publish early in the process and keep readers up to date as you complete the work.

One bonus that's not as obvious: Leanpub also makes distribution to a sample audience easy. You can generate coupon codes trivially.

I'm planning to go straight to Leanpub with my next technical work.

[1]: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php [2]: http://leanpub.com/

I will second Leanpub. I'm going straight to them with anything. It's just fantastic.

The only complaint I've heard about Leanpub is that they don't give the author access to end user email addresses. I don't use email as a marketing tool much (almost never) but I would guess this could be a show-stopper for many eBook authors who are considering their solution.