Our eBook Workflow

Introduction

Our eBook workflow helps us research, prepare, format, and self publish travel articles as eBooks. It is a modest activity that started at the end of 2011 with our eBook on Barcelona. It is driven by enjoyment more than anything – I simply love the process and the technology of it all, and of course we love to travel. We don’t need to make a living from our articles but we do want them to be the best they can be.

We haven’t built much of a social media ecosystem around our articles but this year we are going to try and adopt an approach, which is conservative and not too onerous, using blogs, twitter, instagram and perhaps Google+.

Suddenly I feel we are becoming more aware of the #selfpublishing and #amwriting world out there and we want to learn about it.

Our guiding mantra is for our approach to be practical, affordable and achievable.

Our current workflow is outlined below.

Current eBook Workflow

Research

• The goal of our research is to build an itinerary for our holiday, i.e what activities are we going to do when we travel (e.g. visit a city or island or go narrow-boating on the UK canals), and when.  We’ll also try to identify our accommodation, normally a self-catering apartment close to the major attractions; and examine travel arrangements (e.g. plane and train).
• This research can start 12 months ahead of our travel dates and slowly increase in its intensity and focus. This involves searching the internet for information about the place we are going to visit, with interesting websites clipped to a shared Evernote notebook (we have a Premium subscription) for future reference; and Amazon (because we have Kindles) for existing travel/tour guides about the place we are going to visit; and newspapers (both physically and online).
• We’ll also try to identify a theme for in-depth research.
• We have just started researching Athens and Prague for possible visits in 2016.

On the Road

• During the visit we collect relevant brochures and booklets and buy any interesting DVDs (much lighter than books and more interesting generally).
• I also blog to a private family website which acts like a diary. My wife and I sit down at the end of each day and discuss our experience (which we record). This is a very useful reference and something I want to leverage in the future (e.g for inclusion in the ebooks or on our website).
• During our recent holiday I “discovered” Twitter and now I think it could be a very useful micro-blogging platform during our trips.
• Of course I take as many photos as I can to add to our eBooks. Instagram could be used during our trips as well.

Back at Home

• The first task on return is to sort and prioritise the photos to determine which ones will go in the eBook. I like the photos and the words to have some synergy if possible.
• We decide who is going to write the different parts of the book. Generally Katherine writes everything related to the theme and I do everything else.
• Next thing is to get a draft done as soon as possible – just throw the words down; and, oh dear, I use MS Word.
• To have a break from writing I post-process some photos and get them eBook ready.
• I’m a morning person so I generally don’t write after lunch just fiddle with the photos.
• After a first draft is completed, including photos, I sit down with a printed copy and a green pen and review it – slowly.
• This process is repeated until we are happy with the ebook – in Word – this helps us see the layout very easily.

Pre-Publishing

• Once we are happy with the draft it goes to our “Brains Trust” for review (another reason for using Word – everyone has it). This draft includes an embedded table of contents.
• At this stage I generally prepare the standard cover in MS Visio (a program I used during my project tendering days).
• Once the comments are back the final draft is prepared in Word.
• When we are happy with the final draft, I create a new ePub file in “Sigil – The ePub Editor”. I add the text from Word and the prepared images to build the ePub.

 Publishing

• Separate ePubs are built for Amazon and Smashwords.
• The ePubs are externally validated using the IDPF ePUB Validator.
• The Kindle ePub is converted to the mobi format using Amazon’s Kindle Previewer, and then uploaded to Kindle  Direct Publishing
• The other ePub is uploaded directly to Smashwords.
• Just recently I prepared a separate Word file containing the front-end and back-end material (e.g. Title, Copyright, Other eBooks and About Us). The most recent eBook is the first time we have mentioned our other eBooks at the back (as I said we’re learning).
• I prepared separate files for Amazon and Smashwords – at least I thought I had. I have been through the publishing process on Smashwords four times now and each time it takes me about three attempts to be successful. It’s not the method using Sigil ePubs but my stupid mistakes with final checking (i.e. just recently I had Amazon links in the back matter, the wrong title in one place, and tried to use multiple authors – which they are fixing) – so embarrassing!

 The Future

• On our next trip we are going to re-focus on our recorded discussions with a view to including them in the eBook or at least posting them on our website. So I will be researching this area and making some related posts.
• I see that many people use Scrivener. I tried it about 18 months ago and didn’t like it much.There were a few reasons: I had trouble converting the material into a mobi file; I didn’t like the way it handled photos; I wanted more control over the HTML; and our articles are only 10-15 thousand words not 80 thousand. Should I re-visit it?
• For the moment I am happy with MS Word, Evernote, MS Visio, Photoshop Elements and Sigil for what we need to achieve.

With the other things that happen in our life it can take 3-4 months to publish an eBook, after which I just want to throw papers around the Man Cave!

How can this process be made more practical, affordable and achievable?

This a link to all our The Tool Shed posts. 

This is a link to all our eBook self-publishing posts.