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  1. mammamaia

    mammamaia nit-picker-in-chief Contributor

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    e-dummy seeks e-bk publishing advice

    Discussion in 'Publishing' started by mammamaia, Apr 28, 2011.

    i'm admittedly clueless in re e-books, so am throwing myself on the mercy and experience/expertise of my fellow forumites...

    i want to turn my 6 print books into e-books that can be offered for free as widely as possible... someone told me smashwords was the way to go, but the formatter i hoped would put them into e-pubbing shape just told me that they won't turn out looking like my print pages, due to smashwords' strict formatting rules 'n regs...

    so, does anyone know of a reliable e-publisher that can take my formatted ms.doc files and turn them into an e-book as is?... i do have the cover file from the printer, so at least that should work easily enough...

    love and hopeful hugs, maia
     
  2. psychotick

    psychotick Contributing Member Contributor

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    Hi,

    I've only used the kindle thingy and am probably even more clueless then you. But my thought is that if your other books are published doesn't putting them on line as a freebie violate your contract etc?

    Cheers.
     
  3. TheIllustratedMan

    TheIllustratedMan Active Member

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    All of maia's books are freely available psychotick.
    maia: I've never used these, but you could try: http://www.doc2pdf.net/ , then http://www.2epub.com/ .
    Looks like 2epub works with doc, but someone commented that it works better if you use a pdf, so start with converting you doc to pdf, then the pdf to epub. I have NO idea what the formatting will look like, but if they're any good at all they'll retain the formatting. You could try it with a short excerpt first (ie: save a doc file that's 3 or 4 pages and see what it comes out as before trying the whole book).
    Beyond that, I'm not 100% sure what you're looking for. A lot of readers will read doc files just fine, many of them do pdf as well. If you're looking for better distribution, you'd just have to shop around to find the right place to offer it up for free.
    Good luck!
     
  4. mammamaia

    mammamaia nit-picker-in-chief Contributor

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    i can't convert to pdf, so my plans may be doomed... thanks for the info, im...

    pc...
    yes, as im noted, my books are not 'published'... i pay to have them printed so i can give them away... as i'll do if i can find a way to make them into actual e-books... now, i just send folks my own e-version, which is merely the ms word document formatted to book size...

    love and grateful hugs, m
     
  5. lilix morgan

    lilix morgan Contributing Member

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    Maia,

    I actually was in the hunt for this information the other day! Let me see if I still have the link I had which listed several sites that work to convert your files either to pdfs or epubs. It was actually pretty informative.
    Found it, phew:
    http://reviews.cnet.com/how-to-self-publish-an-e-book

    They mention the likes of lulu, smashwords (which you've already nixed off your list for compatibility reasons), FastPencil, Scribd, along with a few others. I do know that Apple, Amazon, and B&N also offer direct publishing through them, too, but as I'm just skimming the surface of this information as well, I don't know a whole lot about it.

    Best of luck!
     
  6. Cogito

    Cogito Former Mod, Retired Supporter Contributor

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    Microsoft Word 2007 can save as PDF.
     
  7. John Yeoman

    John Yeoman Banned

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    Converting from Word to pdf

    Older versions of Word need a plug-in to convert to pdf. But if you download OpenOffice (Google it - it's free), it will open just about anything - then let you export it to a pdf. If you put a cover on your text, and you export it to a pdf, you really don't need any other ebook format.
     
  8. R.H

    R.H New Member

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    I do the exact same thing, I use open office and its great nothing wrong with open source free software. I use Ubuntu for pretty much everything so open office is a good alternative to ms office and it runs better as well.:)
     
  9. mammamaia

    mammamaia nit-picker-in-chief Contributor

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    sacre chats!... i had no clue... just upgraded to 2007 recently and didn't know what other stuff it could do...

    thanks!
     
  10. psychotick

    psychotick Contributing Member Contributor

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    Hi,

    If you publish through the kindle it can take your word doc as is. Just remember to put in page breaks at the head of each chapter.

    Cheers.
     
  11. mammamaia

    mammamaia nit-picker-in-chief Contributor

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    thanks...

    now, does anyone have a clue why my upload to smashwords came out hugely oversized and with some lines overlapped?... see what i mean with link below...

    i even tried re-uploading as a pdf file [thanks to you guys!] and that still came out too big...
     
  12. Cogito

    Cogito Former Mod, Retired Supporter Contributor

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    PDF can vary greatly in size for the same souce material, depending largely on whether it is rendering the pages as bitmaps or as formatted text, or a mixture.

    For example, PDF is widely used to scan old articles from journals for University libraries, and in those cases it faithfully reproduce the smudges on the page and the edge shadows.

    I've also seen Kindle books and other electronic versions of printed publications that were obviously fed through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. Some of the typos that appear are obvious, like letters split into two that together suggest the shape of thye coirrect letter, or adjacent letters merged into a single character that looks sort of like the pair. They obviously are not being spell-checked or proofread after the conversion.
     
  13. mammamaia

    mammamaia nit-picker-in-chief Contributor

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    i figured it out... it works ok if uploaded/viewed from firefox, but not from int. explorer, for some silly reason...

    thanks for the help, everyone!... you can close this down now, cog...

    hugs, m
     
  14. cologirl42

    cologirl42 New Member

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    I'm using Bookemon and up loading from word. I'm doing a little bio of my Grandma in the 5.5 x 8.5 size. I'm having a problem deciding what font size. Do you think a 12font in New Times Roman is big enough?
     
  15. mammamaia

    mammamaia nit-picker-in-chief Contributor

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    it should be... anything similar to what you would read in a 'real' book should work...
     

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