Adventures in self-publishing II

Last week I described how I went about publishing what was essentially a fairly conventional, text-heavy book in paperback, for the Kindle and Sony Reader, and also to the Apple iBookStore, all without the help of a publisher. While most of my lessons were learned in this, my first experience, I thought I’d compare the problems I encountered when working with a much more elaborately laid out and visually-rich handbook – Live Online Learning: A Facilitator’s Guide.

This publication started off as a free e-book download on the Onlignment site, in PDF format. It was laid out in Adobe InDesign.

Publishing to paperback

As before, I  published to paperback through Lulu. If anything, the upload was even easier than before, because the document was already in PDF format and InDesign is much better set up to go to print (unsurprising given that this is it’s sole purpose). Lulu didn’t do a great job of printing images that extended to the edge of the paper (it left a tiny margin at the bottom) but this was not a deal-breaker, at least not for me.

Publishing to Kindle

It quickly became obvious that an elaborately laid-out PDF was in no way suitable for input to the various e-book readers. I had to copy the text and graphics back out of InDesign and paste it into Word in a much more conventional, linear format. As you can imagine this was tedious and time-consuming. I also removed any fancy fonts, scaled down any larger text and re-built a number of tables. Having said that, the end result on the Kindle was perfectly acceptable.

Publishing to Sony Reader

SmashWords imposed yet more constraints, because their converter wouldn’t work with tables, so these had to be re-worked as plain text. Otherwise, I was able to work with much the same source document as for the Kindle.

Conclusions?

Publishing to multiple platforms is clearly a lot easier if your publication is primarily textual, perhaps with a few diagrams or photos. In this case, where a lot of care had been taken over layout and visuals were really important to the message, something was clearly lost in the conversion to a format suitable for e-readers. That won’t bother most purchasers, who still get 90% of the benefit, but in a much more flexible format and at price that potentially be much lower than the equivalent paperback. I’ll do it again.