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, like selecting all Heading 1’s to make the chapter headings (but then not getting confused and putting two lines as Heading 1). It actually works better with Windows, as my luck would have it. I still use it from time-to-time as it’s good for Smashwords readiness.
Not Suited for Making True eBooks
While many of my readers are looking for Kindle/ePub eBook conversions, only the Pro version of Designrr does that (sorry, I don’t know the price of that).
Designrr’s US$27 version is more useful for designing your own website assets from blogs or web pages, and now Facebook posts.
Why are Digital Assets the Best Kind?
I like to call them assets because that is what cheat sheets, free ebooks, reports, trials, and charts are — they are assets that you give in order to get a new subscriber. They help you build your marketing funnel. Making your digital assets look good is all part of the temptation.
Other assets are ones you will sell, preferably with an automated online system. You can read some more about this in the book by Glen Carlson, 24 Assets. But it’s important to be clear that freely-given assets are just as important as paid ones.
Fix EBook Technical Problems
Of course, firstly see what you can do yourself with converting Word document to ePub. You might try “eBook Flight Deck” – online tool which helps with ePub file verification (before you put it up at the retailers). You may convert the ePub files of 5 titles in one month (for US15).
But if you cannot get anywhere with that, perhaps check out time-saving tools, like Designrr or Canva. Even if I can design things, I am always looking for the most expedient way to do things. Because time is the only currency you cannot save up.
Here is a simple video book trailer, which is easily made: https://youtu.be/ojjkg2XeMCA