9th January 2013

Literature Northwest are hosting a practical workshop aimed at independent publishers who want to learn how make eBooks to a high standard, in-house.

The session will run twice, with one session for Mac OS users (on 31st January) and one for Windows OS users (7th February). 1 - 5pm @ Madlab, 36-40 Edge Street, Manchester, M4 1HN.

It'll be led by Jim Hinks, of Manchester independent Comma Press, who for the past couple of years has overseen Comma’s eBook production. Jim is self-taught, and sympathetic to the challenge of learning eBook production from scratch!

The session will cover all aspects of eBook conversion into ePub (for Kobo and Nook) and MOBI (Kindle) formats, in a step-by-step practical session, including extracting html from inDesign files, ensuring ePub-3 compliant html and CSS, building contents pages (and automatic TOC generation), adding metadata, and testing.

Please note - the session will assume participants already have some basic experience of working with html (e.g. simple updates to content on your blog/website). If you’re an absolute beginner at html and want to attend, it’d be advisable to get a handle on the key principles. You can find some step-by-step guides to html formatting here: http://www.w3schools.com/

What you’ll need to bring:

1) Your laptop
2) An inDesign, rtf, or html file of the book you want to convert
3) Metadata (bibliographic information and blurb) for the book you’re converting.
4) A high-res jpeg (minimum 600x800) of the book’s cover.
5) Any other image files from the book, in jpeg format.
6) You’ll also need download and install the latest version of these two software applications (they’re free!):
Sigil - http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Kindle Previewer - http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765261
7) If you own an eReader, it’d be useful to bring it, along with a USB cable.

The session is on Thurs 7th February, 1pm - 5pm at Madlab.

Places are limited, so if you want to attend, please contact [email protected] (and CC [email protected]) as soon as possible to book your place.