But since I spent a couple of hours exploring some of the
options, and found an approach that is a 90% solution without involving much of
the Nook or Kindle editing tools, I thought I would pass it along.
First, MS Word is a given for me. I have it; I know it; and I am comfortable
with it. If you have other word
processing options, then the rest of this post may be irrelevant for you.
My objective was to find a single MS Word format for the
source manuscript that would require the fewest, most straightforward
conversion steps to get this manuscript into the Nook and Kindle editors while
maintaining the original formatting, table of contents, etc. Here is what I settled on.
First, follow the Kindle instructions for generating a Word
manuscript. Most of those guidelines can
be boiled down to a) keep it simple; and b) use the built in Word controls for things like line
spacing, indenting, etc. rather than carriage returns, spaces, or tabs. There is more than that, and you should read
and follow those instructions, but a lot of their guidance boils down to those 2
points.
For the Kindle manuscript, save the Word document as a filtered
webpage. Again, this is straight out of
the Kindle instructions. And not
surprisingly, when you upload that webpage to the Kindle editor, it will be
pretty close to what you want – probably because all you have done so far is
follow the Kindle instructions.
The work came in finding how to make this Word source
document usable for the Nook manuscript, because the Nook guidelines for a Word
input document are a bit different. For example, you are supposed to use the section new page command
under Page Layout, rather than the Page Break command under Insert between chapters. But even after I made all the manual page
breaks into section pages, things like the chapter titles did not come through
in the automatically generated table of contents. As I have many, short chapters, creating them
in the editor would be 63 manual edits (in the case of book 1) and I would have
to do that each time I tweaked the text.
No way.
So, after playing with alternative conversions from the
original MS Word document (the same one used for Kindle), I came up with the
following steps to get a Nook manuscript:
1.
Download and install the free eBook management
tool called Calibre. An Internet search will provide download sites.
2.
Upload the MS document to Calibre, using the Add
Books menu option (along the top).
3.
Use the Edit Metadata menu option to check for
any modifications needed here. If the
properties on the MS Word document are set correctly, you may not need to do
anything.
4.
Use the Convert Books menu command to create an
ePub version of the manuscript.
5. Save the ePub version from Calibre to your hard drive. The command is 'Save to disk'.
6. Upload the ePub version to Nook and Kobo
publishing. When I did, all of the page
breaks and chapter titles were carried forward, as were the upfront materials
(TOC, dedication page, etc.).
If there are any errors, make the changes in the Word
manuscript. Do NOT use the Nook or Kobo
editors. Then, repeat all steps. As a final precaution, when you publish the
Nook version,
click “Publish” on the Manuscript page and select “The original .epub file I
uploaded”. It may be superstitious
behavior, but both the Kobo and Nook versions had errors that were not in the
ePub manuscript after they were loaded to these respective editors.
As the whole process, Word to
Kindle and Word to Calibre to Nook takes 5 minutes, I don’t sweat making a
change like turning a comma into a semicolon in the Word original.
If this process helps, please use
it. If you have a better way, please let
me know. I am all about making the book
management steps as easy as possible, leaving more time to write.
BmP
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