In a recent blog, ‘Indie Publishing on a Shoestring’, I wrote about how you can use Scrivener to create mobi, epub, and pdf files for publishing on Amazon,  Createspace, and other e-distributors, such as BookBaby, Smashwords, and Draft2Digital. The reason I wrote the blog was to convince new indie authors that it wasn’t that difficult to create these files using Scrivener and upload these files to the websites for publication. And that there was nothing to fear from technical aspects of creating these files. You don’t need to be a technical geek, or have a knowledge of hmtl to do so.

Scrivener is indeed an amazing piece of software, and it is difficult for me today to think how I could live without it. As a writer you might only use 10% of its functionality and it’s still a much better tool for writing novels than most other word processors on the market. And I have used quite a few, including Microsoft Word for most of my business career.

However, if you want to get the most out of Scrivener, you need to invest some time in learning about its capabilities. For example, formatting a pdf file for a print-book can be quite complex if you’re not familiar with  print-book design. You need to set different gutter and outer margins, force chapters to begin on a right side page, turn off printing headers and page numbering on pages with chapter starts, indent paragraphs (except the first paragraph of a chapter), turn off page numbering for the front matter content of the book  etc.

If you hunt around on the Internet you find out how to do this using Scrivener. Just google ‘Createspace and Scrivener’. The Scrivener Manual and various published Scrivener guides will also help. But it will take time.

Recently I bought e-book, “How to Format Your Novel for Kindle, Nook, the iBookstore, Smashwords, & CreateSpace in One Afternoon’ by Ed Ditto. I nearly didn’t. It has a rather naff self-made cover that almost put me off buying it (Sorry Ed, but it does). But the content  is brilliant. It’s a recipe for any author to publish their e-book and print-book. All they need is a copy of Scrivener to do it.  It is a step by step guide that takes you through the process. I only wish I had bought it months ago. Before I bought it I was familiar with about 85% of the content of the guide (having already gone through the publishing process myself). But it was still worth the buy just for the 15% that was new to me. If you are an author starting from scratch, and you have Scrivener, you will find this eBook amazing.

I would add that I have no connection to either Ed Ditto, or Literature & Latte, the software company that makes Scrivener.

Of course, Scrivener is not the only way to create mobi, epub and pdf files for publication. I just think it’s probably the most efficient. If you are wedded to Word then the alternatives would seem to be to convert your files using Jutoh, or Sigil (of which the latter requires a working knowledge of hmtl). Another recent product that has appeared on the Internet is KDPublishing Pro, which creates files for Amazon. Unfortunately I don’t have any direct experience of these products and can’t comment further. But feel free to comment on this blog if you are a big fan of these products.