Make an EPUB on your own

- [Narrator] How do you make a reflowable ePub? There are lots of ways to make reflowable ePubs. From the simple, to the complicated, to okay just give it to somebody else to let them do it. And I'm going to run through a whole bunch of these ways in this video. The killer is that Microsoft Word, which is the program most often used by authors, or that authors give to their publishers, does not have a "save as" or "export to" ePub format. You can't. Here in the file format, there's no ePub.

But there is a webpage filter, and I'm going to come back to this in a little bit. That can be used to help you create an ePub with some programs. Because remember, an ePub is a website. And I'm going to click "cancel" for now. Instead, what most professional eBook developers do, is they'll use a layout program like InDesign or QuarkXPress. Now, I specialize in InDesign and in the library, you'll find a lot of titles by me, about how to create ePubs from InDesign.

Various versions of InDesign. But, briefly, what you do is you go to file place, and you import the Word file. And I'm not going to worry about not having fonts loaded. And then I just flow it into the document. Where it's showing up all highlighted because I don't have a font, don't worry about that. And then you would actually create paragraph and character styles to format it how you want. And then from here, you would export it to ePub. So you go to "file", go down to "export" and InDesign can export both reflowable and fixed layout.

But in reflowable, we choose that, click "save". Choose your options here, such as ePub 3, and how you're going to do the navigation TOC. What are you going to view the ePub with, and then you click "okay." And it's saying that you're missing these fonts. And there is our ePub. So, it's using the default fonts of the eBook Reader, because we didn't have the fonts to include. So that was pretty simple, right? If you have a program that can export to ePub, that's what you want to do. You get the text in there, you format it, then you export it to ePub.

Another thing that you can do, if you don't have the money for QuarkXPress or InDesign, is you can use some free programs. For example, if you use Pages from Apple, which I talked about briefly in a previous chapter. When you are creating a new document, if you scroll to the bottom of the templates user, you'll see that they have a digital book, parentheses ePub, here. You can double click it, and then you can copy and paste your text into here. Create your ePub here. It automatically does the Table of Contents.

And then when you're done, choose file export to ePub. And it makes a very well done ePub 3 for you. Similarly you can go to iBooks Author, and in iBooks Author, that's the program that's only available from Apple, just like Pages is only available from Apple. iBooks Author normally creates the complicated and image-rich and interactive-rich, multi-touch eBooks. But if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see that they now include various ePub templates.

So I could double click one, it opens up, and then here I can import or copy and paste my Word text and apply styles and formatting, and so on. And then when I'm done, I can either publish directly to the iBook Store, which creates a reflowable ePub 3 for them. Or I can choose under file export, and I can choose to create an ePub for myself to take a look at on my own desktop. And sell myself if I wanted to. Now, if you go back to Word and you actually do save it out as a filtered HTML file.

And by filtered it means it doesn't have a whole lot of Word formatting instructions in it, because it's a little cleaner than normal. I'll click "save". And let's see what that looks like in the Finder. There is the HTML file, and then any images that were included are in a separate folder. And then what you can do with this HTML file and this folder, is you can then use a program like Sigil, which is free. And is available from Mac and Windows. And from here you can create a new ePub.

You can start from scratch by saying "new". And it says, "Where are the HTML files? Where are the images?" And you can actually put it together right here in Sigil. Or, finally, if you say, "You know what, this is too much work, I want to do something else with my manuscript, and I need an reflowable ePub." Well then, just hide "e" to your favorite browser and check out some of these third party services like Lulu.com. Which lets you create eBooks and it says that you can format your Word document and give them an ePub or .pdf. Don't fret, scroll down, and they will do it for you.

They can go ahead and take your Word file and they will create an ePub for you. Or Smashwords, which is quite well-known, is a service that lets you upload your Word file, and then they will turn it into all the different formats for all these different places where people buy eBooks. And you need to just follow their instructions getting started is easy as 1, 2, 3. You sign up for a free account. This is the most important thing, is that you download the style guide, which tells you how to format your Word file. And it's pretty basic and simple.

If your eBook has a lot of images or video, then you're not going to be able to use Smashwords or Lulu.com. And you'll probably want to figure out a way to do it with some of the software that you already have. Or hire an actual design firm for your ePub. And there are a number of them out there. Though there are lots of options for turning your Word manuscript or your text-only manuscript into an ePub. Bring into a layout program, and export it to ePub from there. Or hire an outside service.