Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: hopeful
  • Music: Dan Bern, "No Missing Link."

Help needed with e-book formatting.

Hello, internet world!

I have a short story that I'm intending to offer as a free download early next year, to celebrate the release of Discount Armageddon. This means I need the story to be in e-pub format. Anybody got the technical skills to make this for to go? I'll be your best friend, or something (or send you a book, whatever).

It's a pretty short story, about 7,000 words, and will have a cover and an internal dingbat for dividing sections.

ETA: While I appreciate the suggestions, if I had the time to do this myself right now, I would. I do not have time, so I am asking for help. Please stop suggesting ways for me to do it for myself.
Tags: incryptid, shameless plea, short fiction
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  • 50 comments

adorna

November 23 2011, 18:07:36 UTC 5 years ago

if you want to publish through amazon, they will also do the conversion for you if you send them a html or text file. Looks like you already got help though.

seanan_mcguire

November 23 2011, 18:11:48 UTC 5 years ago

I want to give this away for free, not tie it to a distribution service. Thanks for the tip, however.

adorna

November 23 2011, 18:17:24 UTC 5 years ago

I think you can have free downloads - at least there are some...

archangelbeth

November 23 2011, 18:49:43 UTC 5 years ago

If self-publishing, there is currently no way to start with a freebie from Amazon. What one has to do is set it for 99c or the like, then upload to B&N via Pubit, or Smashwords, and set that price as free. Eventually, Amazon discovers the free price and auto-lowers to match.

I think B&N's Pubit will allow free-from-the-get-go... I go through Smashwords since, at 99c stories, I actually get higher royalties by having them ship to B&N for me! If I had something around the breakpoint for B&N royalties, which I think is 2.99, I'd use Pubit for that, probably.)

(Lady McGuire, if you want any tips for going through Smashwords, just ask -- I can totally format something for you that way, though, again, I'd have to futz with dingbats. All my stuff is just cover + basic text (regular, bold, italics, some font-size changes).)

seanan_mcguire

November 23 2011, 18:51:27 UTC 5 years ago

Or I could do what I'm planning: from my website, no gateway site, no pseudo publisher. Thank you very much for the suggestion, but I have a firm course in mind.

archangelbeth

November 24 2011, 02:10:55 UTC 5 years ago Edited:  November 24 2011, 02:12:38 UTC

I kinda suspected that you wouldn't really want to go with a place where someone might need to get an account, just for a freebie. Smashwords is more useful to self-publishers who don't have an established website (and possibly not much established fandom), and want to get their stuff onto some of the online distributors in part just to get found. (Sony and B&N have been surprisingly good to me!)

But... *beth puts on a muppet costume and cues up "Labyrinth" music* ...should you ever need... O;>


(Edited to fix a very stupid missing close-parenthesis. Doh!)