ebook conversions Archives | Jennifer Lancaster

February 22, 2023

eBook Formatting Service for Kindle

These days, once you get your file cleaned up and ready for upload to the Amazon Kindle platform (KDP), it often can go through straight up. But for specially designed, image-laden eBooks, there is a software to get your ebooks formatted. On this, I would not bother trying to get an eBook converted and designed in these ways: Calibre – absolutely the hardest way for novices, but it is a free option Kindle Create – free, but you have to start again if your charts/graphics don’t appear correctly and thus you lose ALL your changes. It outputs KPF – a Kindle Publishing only format. Oh, What to Do for my Ebook? If you want to do-it-yourself in designing ebooks more than just once, Atticus is the software for you, at US$147. It takes in your .RTF or .DOCX file and…

March 11, 2019

Book Marketing, Selling eBooks and Media

A new tool for creating ebooks / lead magnets

Sometimes a designing service comes up that makes me think: “why did I even bother doing it the hard way?” An online ebook builder (for websites), ‘Designrr’, is making me think this. It’s a simple way of creating a lead magnet — or perhaps a larger ebook for distribution — from your own web pages…. without the stress of learning Adobe InDesign. Feedback from author users leads me to suggest it is not ideal for full Kindle eBooks. You are perhaps best off taking the designed PDF & native file and getting an online freelancer to convert that to your .ePub or .mobi file. Another paid tool for creating ebooks that I’ve used in the past is Jutoh. But Jutoh is not for the fainthearted. It requires knowledge of what to clean up, why tick “make NCX”, and pre-conversion things,…

May 14, 2025

Self-Publishing

Two Types of Interactive eBooks that you can Make

You might already know there are two kinds of eBooks: Fixed Format and Reflowable. Fixed format suits grand layouts with images, whereas reflowable ebooks suits 90% of text-based books. There are also two types of interactive ebooks: ePub and PDF. Today I set about making an Interactive ePub from a plain fixed format, directly in InDesign. While there are many more elements to discover, I think I’ve got the hang of animations and buttons. There is a handy Adobe InDesign tutorial to learn how to add animations, slide shows, and buttons to an ePub. I noticed that their “workspace” is designated as ePub, whereas my CC 2017 version says “Interactive”. This workspace helps to bring up the right menus on the side. I find it fun to put some animated graphics on pages that were blank, or where I wanted to illustrate the words.…