I’ve formatted my book for .mobi using Scrivner, and it uploads to Amazon and All Romance just fine.
I formatted my book for .epub using Scrivener and the very same files, and uploaded it to Kobo, no problem, Smashwords, no problem, but uploading it to B&N causes all kinds of problems.
The Nook previewer skews the text to center everything, or it centers parts of the text and not others, it makes things huge, no matter what I put the previewer settings to. In short, it makes my ebook look horrible. (I might be new at this but I know what horrible looks like!)
The Nook folks tell you that if you ask them to “Upload the epub I’m giving you” rather than to do any changes, then the previewer will look fine. But I’ve tested this and it still looks horrible.
Advice has been given that directs me to edit the file in Sigil or Calibre - but I think Scrivener should be able to product a good epub - and it does, for everyone but Nook. If I have to go to Calibre to edit my book, this is an extra step. If I need to take it I will.
However, are there some special settings in Scrivener that will help with this?
The Nook previewer is a bane, no debate there, and it looks nothing like an actual Nook, which is where the whole thing gets silly. Do you optimise for their preview engine, or just focus on making it look good for the reader? Obviously both would be idea, but that may not always be possible.
At any rate, there is indeed one checkbox in the compiler you should always use for Nook, Kobo and anything else using the Adobe engine: Include standard Adobe Digital Editions page template, in the Layout pane. Without that, the reading device may not even add margins, causing text to flow all the way to the edge of the physical display hardware.
That won’t help you with Nook preview though, to my knowledge. What sort of steps are you finding yourself taking to improve the output? We don’t have a lot of control over the actual HTML/CSS, but a little.
Thank you for your answer. I will compile my epub using that checkbox, in the Layout pane.
To improve my results, I’ve gone back and resized my images and logo. And then, when I upload to Nook, I made sure to check the “upload the epub I just uploaded” option. I wrote to Nook to ask them about this very option (which I already knew about) and they replied with the same information I was sending to them. Very frustrating.
I think that my concern is, after formatting it all nice and neat in Scrivener, I don’t want to spend the time tweaking the html code in Calibre - and all just to make it look nice in the Nook previewer. My .mobi file and my epub file look great in every other previewer out there, including on my own tests in the Sony Reader, Calibre, and the Kindle Previewer. I feel fairly certain that the issue arises because of the Nook previewer, and not from Scrivener or anything else that I’m doing.
One person suggested that I compile in Scrivener, then upload to Calibre. Then convert from a Scrivener-epub to a Calibre-epub - the Calibre-formatted epub looks okay in the Nook previewer. Or so I’ve been told.
Plus I wanted to check to see if there was anything that other Scriveners had noticed or tried.