One of PG’s relatives (on Mrs. PG’s side of the family, so he’s not dodgy) called PG to ask about formatting an ebook for the first time.
PG knew about Apple Pages, but not much else.
Any Mac folks who have had a good experience with a different approach to writing on a Mac, then self-publishing?
Vellum is hands-down the best. I do most of my workflow for writing or writing-related tasks on either a Windows PC or a Ubuntu Linux computer, but I bought a used MacBook Air specifically for the purpose of running Vellum.
I’ve done all my writing (and programming) in BBEdit (Mac only) for many years. BBEdit’s text handling is superb, and I don’t care about layout when I’m writing: no point at that stage anyway.
Jutoh for powerful multi-platform formatting, with error correction.
LibreOffice for Contents page links, and pagination (for the KDP paperback).
Gimp for cover layout.
The first two are paid programs, the other two are open source. Links are here:
http://www.LoftingAgency.com/Lofting-Base/Writers-Tools.html
I write in Google Docs on a big iMac (27” for all my windows and tabs), then convert to HTML (via BBEdit), then go into open-source Sigil, and then export to .epub.
Amazon loves my .epubs (they sail right through).
This is not a one-click process, but I have total control and a perfect end result (notwithstanding any authorial mistakes, of course).
Also: InDesign for Pbk; Photoshop for my covers.
I never used any application to format the manuscript for my e-Book. I only use Word document and follow a few simple rules:
-An e-Book is a scrolling document, not like a paper book, there is no empty page before each new chapter. As a matter of fact there should not be a lot of empty lines, blank spaces.
-In the Table of Contents, the chapters must be linked to the actual chapters in the e-book. That’s how you navigate in the e-Book. Page number don’t mean much.
-When you load the manuscript in Kindle, it will tell you if you have errors and give you a chance to review the digitizad document
And that’s about it
It really depends on intent. Also source.
For casual creation (and fantastic ebook management) Calibre is Open Source and free.
Once upon a time BAEN (reportedly) used it for their commercial ebooks. Probably long past but it is pretty good. For testing, if nothing else. It accepts pretty much any text format and outputs most ebook formats, including various forms of Mobi/Kindle.
https://calibre-ebook.com
Quite a few Office suites and WordProcessors have an epub export option. Softmaker Office and Libre Office have Mac versions.
If money is no object, InDesign can do both reflowing and fixed format.
If committed to Apple uber alles, iBook Author is free in their apps store.
There is also a wide variety of standalone epub creation tools but most are using the Calobre open source code so, counterindicated.
For commercial ebooks, most of tbe stores accept standard Word Processing formats as do the aggregator/distributors like D2D.
Personally, I’d suggest Calibre to learn/test and if going commercial get a Word Processor or Office suite. Or commit to Vellum.
Vellum is the simple go to, but costs money. But once you’ve plunked down the dosh, it’s real easy to turn a document into a book.
Alternatives, Scrivener can compile your document for you too. But I went and bought Vellum, because…
I have used both Vellum and Scrivener. Vellum is easy to use, but is fairly expensive. Scrivener is more difficult to use but much cheaper and has many more features. Scrivener is a full blown word processor and formatter, whereas Vellum is just for ebooks. I’m not sure I have a preference over one or the other as it depends on your workflow. I have never used Pages to create an ebook because I simply didn’t trust it would create something compatible for anything but the iBooks store. For a while I was writing in Pages, exporting to MS Word for for editing and proofing, and then importing the final text into Scrivener or Vellum for ebook creation.
Vellum. How much?
$200-$250 for Vellum versus $50 for Scrivener. I think I paid less for Vellum, though, I can’t remember what I paid now.
Also it appears that Vellum now has a pbook formatting option.
I’m not even a Mac user and I bought Vellum. It was just too hard to ignore the economic incentive of ‘pushing one button produces a file for both major ebook formats *and* a paperback.’ I’ve saved thousands of dollars since.