My ePub file is finally awesome

But before I get to that: I’ve uploaded the final part of my book excerpt, Chapter Three! I’ve also re-uploaded chapters 1 & 2 because I made some minor changes in them as I was going through my print proof. My second proof was ordered today, so barring anything crazy with that, I hope to be ready to publish by the end of next week. Exciting!

Now, on to the original point of this post. While I wait for that second proof to print and ship to me, I’ve been going through the ebook files to make sure they’re all clean and perfect and ready to go. I want to be able to publish all versions at once, so as soon as the print edition is good, I’m going to hit the button on everything. Which means I need to make sure my Kindle and ePub files are as sparkling and wonderful as possible.

I’ve been going through the ePub first (for Nook, since that seems to be the only platform I can publish to on my own right now), and found a few errors. Easy enough to fix, but as I was looking them over in the Nook for PC and Adobe Digital Editions readers, I noticed some other things that weren’t working quite right. First, in Adobe Digital Editions, the table of contents pane was empty, with a message that the book didn’t have a TOC. Well, that’s not true! I spent quite a lot of time coding a toc.ncx file so my TOC would show up in any reader! Google to the rescue: it turned out I had a tiny bit of that code wrong. In case anyone comes across a similar problem, here’s what fixed it for me:

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ePub done! And Kindle TOC tips

Yesterday, I managed to get my book properly into ePub format. Woo! I still need to put it on a Nook and read through it (and possibly get it on my iPad and see if I can read it in iBooks), just to be sure the formatting is good, but a quick skim in Adobe Digital Editions looked promising. It was a real pain to do, partly because I’m such a control freak and had to do it all by hand, but also because, when I got frustrated with that method and actually tried a conversion program, it made a royal mess out of the whole thing. This is why I am such a control freak: if you want it done right, do it yourself.

I’ll do a post later about what I had to do to wrangle my nicely-polished Kindle HTML file into an equally-polished ePub, but rather than going off on a new subject right now, I want to finish what I promised last week and write up some tips on doing a Table of Contents for a Kindle ebook.

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