I’ve got 3 books I’m going to need to convert to ePub, mobi, and such very soon and want to know what everyone considers the “best” workflow to get it done.
2 books only have covers and then text. One book has some images in the book at the beginning of each chapter. I would like to include those images into the epub to make the book complete, if at all possible.
2 of the books are large, 105,000 words or so. The other is shorter, about 35,000 words.
I’ve read about output from Scrivener, using Calibre, Sigil, and the like, but there seems to be no comprehensive, tried and tested process. There seem to be many guesses and compile-fail-compile posts out there.
Thank you for your guidance!
Probably a reason why you haven’t found a clear single-purpose guide anywhere is that there isn’t a single right way to turn a book into an e-book as there are many different start and end points in that equation. It depends a lot on the current state of the book. Is it a singular .doc file at the moment? If so you’ll want to import that into the Binder and then split it up into at least chapter sized chunks so that a proper table of contents can be constructed for the e-book.
If it was written in Scrivener, it may already be in a state that is ready for output, especially if creating a PDF with the compiler puts page breaks in all of the right spots (Scrivener will use requests for page breaks as section cuts, in the e-book).
Chances are, if the images are just embedded in the original .doc file it will “just work”. Any images included in the main editor will be exported and hooked up in the e-book for display as the reader pages through. If they aren’t already embedded, then that’s how you do it. Just drop the graphic into the text where it should go.
One thing you may need to adjust is the size of the original image. If they were created for the print version of the book, they may be far too large for an e-book. You’ll need to decrease their size before embedding them for the best results.
If you need any specific advice on a particular aspect of this, let us know!