Self-Made
In the past, publishing a book meant sending it to a publishing house. With Amazon's CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing, you can now publish on your own. This article will guide you through the process.
|
Marek Uliasz, 123RF
In the past, publishing a book meant sending it to a publishing house. With Amazon's CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing, you can now publish on your own. This article will guide you through the process.
Before a book can appear in printed or electronic form at a book supplier, it must go through several steps. To begin, the process requires a manuscript; the author creates the book using a text editor that later becomes the basis for publication. Next, submitting the manuscript as a file to a publishing house involves the time-consuming work of an editor to create a well-formatted and publishable document from the writer's jumble of text.
If you prefer to self-publish with Amazon's CreateSpace [1] and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) [2], however, the editing work is up to you. In practice, the free office packages LibreOffice [3] and OpenOffice [4] are available as extremely powerful tools for this purpose.
The publishable files – not to be confused with the raw manuscript – make up the published book, now completely formatted in an acceptable way. In the case of CreateSpace, these are PDF files, whereas KDP works primarily in the HTML format. Again, LibreOffice and OpenOffice are especially well-suited here, because they can export manuscripts to PDF or HTML. (See the "Error Correction" box for more information.)
[...]
Pages: 8
If you want not only to enjoy e-books in EPUB format but also to create them, take a look at the easy-to-use and versatile editor from Sigil.
The Sigil e-book editor covers all important aspects of creating e-books. The current version shines with new functions and is extensible through plugins.
Calibre lets you bring some order to your digital library. You not only can restore reading material lost on your hard drive, but you can also convert digital books into a format of your choice.
Creating database applications with wizards and graphic editors – without SQL and programming – that's what the LibreOffice program Base, modeled after Microsoft Access, is all about.
A document's design can make a lasting impression. We provide some tips to achieve a pleasing combination of fonts, color, and spacing.
© 2025 Linux New Media USA, LLC – Legal Notice