Publishing & Marketing Help

3 Ways to Create and Publish Your Own eBook

Do you want to publish your new novel to the Kindle store? Have you thought about creating an eBook for the iPad? This is a worthy medium, as more people are getting into tablet devices. In fact, some schools even offer laptops and iPads to their students to aid in their studies, adding to the number of tablet owners. If you’ve been wondering about how you can create and publish your own eBook for this growing base of users, here are some suggestions to get you started.

1.) Use iBooks Author for iPad eBooks

This free app is available in the Mac App Store and will let you create stunning eBooks for the iPad with image galleries, videos, interactive diagrams, 3D objects and more. You can start off with a pre-designed template and then drag and drop your content into the book, adding widgets and animations along the way.
This app is not the most intuitive to use, so you may want to check out this free 110-page guide to Publishing with iBooks Author: An Introduction to Creating Ebooks for the iPad.

Additionally, Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers has found 26 iBooks Author How-to Videos which will walk you through everything from choosing a template to using custom HTML5 widgets in your iBooks.

2.) Create an ePub File for iPads, Android Devices, & Nooks

The ePub format is an open standard which is used by a variety of different devices including iOS devices, Android devices, Nooks, Sony Readers, and more. You can use the free, open source software Sigil to create and edit ePub format eBooks. You will, in essence be converting html pages to ePub format during this process.

In addition to Sigil for creating ePub format eBooks, you can also use the open source application Calibre as an alternative. MakeUseOf covers the use of both of these programs for this purpose in their article How To Make An ePub File For The iPad, Nook, Kobo & More.

3.) Create a Mobipocket eBook for Kindles

This is really a two-step process. First, you’ll want to have already created an ePub file using Sigil or some other program. Once you’ve got your ePub file in hand, download the Kindle Previewer application. This will not only let you preview what your eBook will look like on a Kindle device, but will enable you to convert your ePub file to MOBI format for upload to the Kindle store.


And here’s a detailed tutorial for How To Make Your Own eBooks And Publish Them On Amazon at MakeUseOf. This helpful walkthrough illustrates the step-by-step process to uploading your complete eBook to Amazon.