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How To Make an eBook:

A Thorough Guide!

S

o, you’re here to make books, and you don’t want to pay out the nose to do it. Maybe this is an attempt to step up the game on your bookbinding hobby. Maybe you want to surprise a friend with a cute poetry booklet. Maybe you’re making a scrappy little ‘zine and don’t wanna pay for Scribus. Or, maybe you’re here just to slap something down on the Amazon marketplace. Either way, we won’t judge! We have a lifelong hyperfixation on good design, and this guide is for anyone willing to put up with our rambling.

As with any craft, it can take a lot of time to hone your formatting skills, so if you have big plans, the best time to start is now. Honestly, we've made a lot of mistakes in our self-publishing endeavors — which means that we now know how to fix those mistakes in our new projects. Learn from our fuckups so that you make less of your own!

First things first; you should make yourself familiar with the usual ebook formats.

  • .EPUB — The most common format, and the best supported file type. EPUB content is malleable, and adjusts its presentation to fit the display size and parameters of its output device, much like a HTML webpage. This sort of formatting is known as “reflowable” formatting. It's also very easy for a user on the other end to re-adapt an EPUB to meet any visibility or reading difficulty related needs they might have. There are also different types of EPUBs;
  • EPUB2 — An older, simpler version of EPUB that's been around since 2007. Where's EPUB1, you ask? Nowhere. EPUB2 was basically a maintenence update, making this the default EPUB format right now.
  • EPUB3 — The newer, more experimental version of EPUB. It uses HTML5, which provides a slightly different coding style, and it has support for some new features like fixed layout documents. Unless you're planning on trying some really fancy code, you probably won't need to use EPUB3; most, if not all EPUB-reading software is compatible with EPUB2.
  • .PDF — A portable file document. PDFs are good for aligning text in a fixed size and shape; this means that PDFs are optimal for carrying out specific aesthetic visions, and a PDF file with the right dimensions and margins can also be used to print physical copies! Personally, PDF is our favorite of these file types, but that doesn't make it the best for every situation.
  • .MOBI — We don’t make these, since MOBI is an Amazon-based file type, so we won’t be much help if you go this route. Suffice it to say that MOBI is similar to EPUB, in that it is reflowable and more easily adjusted by the reader. It is also better suited to smaller screens.
  • Webpage — If you want, you could just post an entire webnovel for free on the internet as website. Nobody can stop you! An Unauthorized Fan Treatise is a nice, immersive example of this, and we might even put out a few free books on here in the future.

There are definitely other forms an ebook can take, such as audiobooks! Personally, we have the most experience making EPUBs & PDFs, and we’re going to put up guides that’ll walk you through the process using our favorite freeware. For EPUBs, we’ll show you how to use Sigil. And for PDFs, we’ll show you how to use Scribus. But before you go into into those guides, consider reviewing the sections below first in order to get a grasp on what generally goes into a book of any kind.


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