Just to thoroughly and entirely ruin all the drama we've been building up to, just to wreck every scintilla of tension, let us tell you right at the start that we do now have a new book out. We were not kidding all week, when we said we didn't know if it were possible to produce a book alongside this series of articles about producing books. We were entirely serious, every time we angrily regretted our stupidity in telling you that we were even going to try. Yet for this last article about physically producing an e-book and then getting it through Apple and Amazon's approvals process, we wrote an e-book and we got it through Apple and Amazon's approvals process.
At least let us keep you waiting before we reveal that the approval stage was easier than with any of our other books, and that by utter chance was also far faster. Let us tell you first about how to take a book you've written in Word or Scrivener, and turn it into the form you need to make an e-book that can go on the Apple iBooks Store and Amazon's Kindle.
One more software application
We could tell you a fair few more applications to add to the pile you've been reading about all week. There are ones like Calibre that produce e-books and have powerful features, but to our mind are a little tough to use, a little clunky. We could also remind you what we said yesterday about producing paperbacks, and specifically how as long as your application can produce PDFs, you can use almost anything to make e-books. Certainly if you're a Scrivener user, you have all the tools you need, just possibly quite well-hidden and quite hard to use. Once again, Scrivener has our hearts for how well you can use it to write, but we're not fans of how complex its production stages are in the current version (though they have hinted that they are working to streamline that).
Still, not only does it work, but we've used it on several book projects over the last couple of years. That's the thing with this series of articles, that's the reason we did this ridiculously foolish thing of saying publicly that we'd produce another new book alongside it: what we're telling you is real and tested. You can learn a lot from reading even our reviews of iBooks Author or other apps, but we believe that the only way to really learn something is by doing it. Consequently, we are required to believe that the only way to show anyone how to do anything is to actually do it.
When you've got hammers and spanners in your hand, the work is real -- and you know what's important, and what will give you callouses. If we learned one thing from all of this, then we're rubbish. But if we learned two things, it is firstly that the written word is what matters the most, and so it needs time and it needs support. The second thing is that we're now unlikely to ever produce an e-book without using an app called
Vellum.
Vellum in practice
Vellum is a free app that then charges you each time you produce a brand-new book. There is an argument that it's expensive and while we do not agree, we can't ignore that there are no charges if you produce books via Word or Scrivener -- at least no charges beyond the purchase price of that software. With Vellum you pay $30 to produce one e-book, or you can spend $100 to make 10, or $200 to make as many as you like, forever. It's true that $200 is a lot if you're just playing around, but we're not playing around -- and neither are you.
There is a better argument that Apple's iBooks Author has similar tools, and is no longer limited to solely producing iBooks.
As we've said before, we really like iBooks Author, but actually the elements we like the most about it are the same ones that you have to switch off if you're producing books to also go on Kindle.
So all week, we've been ending these articles with
What We Did Next and it's time to instead show you in detail
What We Did Now.
What We Did Now
The new book,
Pointers: iWork Pages, Numbers and Keynote is primarily a collection of Pointers tutorials that were originally written for
MacNN.com. That's really how we were physically able to do this book in a week, though even then only because we had been having the occasional online discussion about what a potential new Pointers book should contain.
This doesn't mean we could skip all of the writing and especially the rewriting work that we've described to you. The book runs to about 24,000 words, and there isn't a single one of which hasn't been at least looked at, if not sandpapered and polished. Every tutorial was re-tested to check that it works on the latest Apple software, every tutorial was rewritten to reflect the new information and the extra details we found since the original was published.
Then, unlike our thankfully very successful first volume of Pointers tutorials, this one needed some brand-new material. To make the kind of comprehensive guide that we wanted for these Apple applications, we needed more -- so we wrote more. While Charles Martin and William Gallagher researched and wrote new chapters, Bradley McBurney worked on the cover, and
MacNN managing editor Mike Wuerthele wrote a foreword while travelling.
We then did one final edit pass on the book in Pages before moving it, chapter by chapter, into Vellum. You can load up your entire book in one go into Vellum, but we went chapter-by-chapter as part of re-re-re-examining the text. We would only put a chapter into this software when we were happy with it, and even then we tagged each part with a bullet symbol in the title to mark that we weren't finished. When every piece was in, we would work through formatting issues: we found that each paragraph had gone in with double spacing, so we rattled through removing those.
Then, links to other websites and other resources need to be formatted differently in an e-book than on a website, so we did that for every one. Equally, you see that
What We Did Now heading above? The book has plenty of headings, and they all have to look different for the book. After a while of using Vellum's controls to change selected text into a heading, we used the separate
Keyboard Maestro app to add a keystroke for it. We flew after that: select text, tap a key, watch it change to a heading, and then move on.
Images are also different in e-books: there are limits and sizes that do and don't look good, plus we don't believe you can actually have very many images in a book, because they break up the pages in ugly ways. So we had to choose carefully what really needed illustration and what didn't, which also meant rewriting chapters again to make that work, plus we then had to redo all the illustrations to make them work in the book's format.
If this sounds like more reworking than working, there is one last thing we did. Despite discussions before this week and all the work since Monday, despite adding new chapters and revising the order of the book, the very last thing we did was re-order the chapters yet again. We've said this before when talking about writing: just seeing something in a different font and layout can help you see things you missed. Having all these chapters together in a book, and proofreading it on iPad, we saw how we'd got the order wrong, and it would be much improved by starting with these chapters, grouping those together, and then ending with this other one.
Generate
Books are collaborative efforts, especially non-fiction collected works like this one, but it comes down to one person to press the Generate button in Vellum. Read our
more detailed review of Vellum for how each step goes, but the principle is that you press a button marked Purchase and then when you've paid your cash, that same button is changed to Generate. Press that, and you create your e-books. There are options for what types to make and where to save them, but what you're going to end up with is one iBooks-formatted and one Kindle-formatted e-book in different folders on your Mac.
Then it's a matter of uploading them to Apple and Amazon, and there the process is first that you sign up to publish on these services, then you use tools those companies provide, then that you wait for them to approve what you've done.
Apple's iBooks
You have to use an Apple app called iTunes Producer to upload iBooks: you have to use it, and it solely works on OS X. When you sign up as an iTunes publisher, you get a link to the app -- and if you are writing within iBooks Author, you can send books straight from that into the publishing app. As Vellum users, we had to launch iTunes Producer, and drag our book into the right section.
There's the book itself, and there is the cover: you put these together in Vellum, but then that app produces separate files for you to drag to the right places. You can also drag a shorter, sample version of your book, but we've not bothered with that: if you don't do it, Apple creates one for you, that is just the opening few pages or maybe a chapter. That's fine, that's what we wanted the sample to be, so let Apple do it.
You also have to specify the price of the book, and where you're going to sell it. We choose All Territories, and we set the price to 99 cents. We also set the book to not have Digital Rights Management: if you want to copy the book and pass it around to friends, you go right ahead. We want the material out there, we want it to be helpful -- though we'd quite like the cash, let's not ignore that.
The hardest part of iTunes Producer is that you have to write specific details about the book, starting with easy stuff like the authors' names, and then going on to a pithy description to be displayed to entice readers. Then, you also have to pick categories for the book to be filed in, and that's murder. Good luck with that one. Lastly,
you should have an ISBN if you want to sell books. Again we had a time advantage there, because you buy International Standard Book Numbers in blocks of 10 in the UK, and we hadn't used up our last one.
Then you press Submit, and away off it goes to Apple -- hopefully. We didn't have any problems with this new Pointers book, but we have had errors before, and they were significant ones. Significant in that they had to be fixed or we physically couldn't submit the book, but also very significant in that we could not fathom out what they were. Really confusing error messages, and all referring to particular numbered lines in our book when we had no clue where those bits were. If you hit this or any other rejection, use
ePub validator. It's a free (within limits) online service that you briefly upload your book to, and it returns far more helpful error messages.
Once you've fixed those and hit Submit again, now your book is with Apple, and the clock is running: Apple says that every book is personally checked by human beings before being approved, and that's true. They also say it takes up to a day to happen, and in our experience that's being cautious: we've had books approved in fewer than 12 hours, and whenever it's taken longer it's because the books weren't approved. We'll cover that in a moment but for now, let us state that we submitted the new Pointers book to Apple at 15:05 GMT yesterday.
Amazon Kindle
When you've schlepped through the iBooks process, you are tempted to just go get a mug of tea, but press on to Amazon -- because if you do it right away, then you will remember all the fiddly details you just cooked up for iBooks, like which categories you want. Again, you have to have
signed up to Amazon's Kindle publishing service, and then you have to use Kindle's tools, but they are all online. Click to start a new book, and it steps you through pretty much exactly the same procedure you just did with Apple.
That extends to how you need descriptions, author names, and prices. Apple has taken a lot of criticism for how it takes 30 percent of your cover price but, trust us, that's a lot clearer and easier than Amazon's system. With Amazon, you can say that you want to get 70 percent of the revenues, and that sounds exactly the same as Apple's take, just phrased the other way around. Only, go ahead, choose the 70 percent option if you dare. It'll work under certain circumstances, but you will always find that there are territories where Amazon says no, tough luck, you're only getting 35 percent. Then we were adamant that we wanted to price our new book at 99 cents on Kindle too, and fine, we can do that -- but we're not getting 70 percent if the price is that low.
You don't have a lot of options here, you just take what you're given, and press on. You have to upload the book contents and cover, and both get checked for typical errors. You also, on Amazon's Kindle, get the option to preview your book: take it. Even though you've read it a million times now, say yes. Amazon shows you the contents of your book as they will look on a Kindle device. If you spot something you don't like, go right back to Vellum, make the changes there, and re-generate a new document to upload.
As with Apple, once you've confirmed that you have the rights to this book, you hit Submit, and then the book is off to the races while you're left waiting for the approvals process. Again as with Apple, Amazon says this can take up to a day. We submitted the new Pointers book to Amazon at 15:15 GMT yesterday. Then we had tea.
Approvals process
Maybe we've just been lucky, but Amazon approval is a doddle. We once, just once, had a peculiar problem with the formatting coming out bizarrely small and oddly positioned, but that was exclusively to do with then turning the e-book into a paperback. As for just e-books, we've never seen any problem, any difficulty, nor any particular delay. Even so, it was a bit of a surprise to get emailed at 20:27 yesterday with "Your book is available in the Kindle Store!"
We've had much more difficulty with Apple's process and, okay, we'd rather that had been easier too, but we're not going to fault Apple for being thorough. This time, though, we didn't have the slightest pixel of an issue and, bizarrely, the approval was pretty much as unusually fast from Apple as it was from Amazon. We got the email "Your book is now available on iBooks" at 20:38 last night. You're a writer, we're writers, let's all spot the difference there: Kindle emailed with an exclamation mark like it's surprised we've got a book out, Apple emailed with a flat full stop like we all do this all day, every day. We like that Apple attitude.
We weren't such Apple fans over the production of previous titles, and in fact it is specifically the issue of approvals and all we learned from the problems, that made us decide to write this week's special Pointers series. About three weeks ago, we had a complaint from Apple that there was a problem with a book of ours called
Pixels & Paper, ironically about how to produce e-books. They felt that it was infringing on Apple's trademarks, or at least that a reasonable reader could be confused into thinking it was an Apple book. That's entirely reasonable, even if we're not sure why it was a retrospective complaint when the book had long made it through approvals.
We actually haven't fixed that yet, and have lived with the fact that the book is off sale until we do. The reason we haven't fixed it is that we didn't know what to do, and while we were trying to find out, we had exactly the same complaint about a new series of short books that
MacNN has produced for people new to iPads, Macs and iTunes. Apple allowed two of those, but refused the third for these same issues of confusing readers, and we decided to fix that so the three could be released together.
Again, we didn't know what to do, and when Apple complains it quotes you a passage from its rules which are probably entirely clear to lawyers, but left us unsure. That's not entirely fair: some of it was plain as day. We just needed to amend the text and the description to make it entirely clearly that these titles were by
MacNN, and that as such were independent of Apple. Since we use "Mac" in the name of our site, that's probably what Apple was concerned people would think made it "official" from Apple. Fine, and we now suspect that's all we need to do with Pixels & Paper too.
Only, Apple also had issues with the cover of one of these guides and how, arguably, it had the look of Apple publications. It was the one for new iPad users, so of course the cover had a picture of an iPad on. Artist Bradley McBurney did a new cover with a different shot, and that was rejected. He did a third cover with a different shot and that was rejected. We gave him a new brief: "Make it boring," we said. He struggled with that, and needn't have bothered, because that was rejected too.
It took a fifth cover where we emphasized the name
MacNN, and used an iPad showing writer William Gallagher's home screen instead of the standard out-of-the-box Apple one. Then it was approved, and the book went on sale, and we can tell you that more than tea was drunk then.
What we'll do next
That's up to you. The
new Pointers book about the iWork apps Pages, Numbers and Keynote is a direct result of your having bought the first Pointers guide to all the OS X and iOS software you get with your devices. You can bet anything that we have plans for a third volume if this one is as successful.
You can also bet that we'll do it in the same way we've done these with Pages, Scrivener, Transcriptions, Microsoft Word, OmniOutliner, MindNode, and Vellum. Hand on heart, we might not try to do it all in a week, though. That was just nutty.
Follow our whole week-long Pointers on writing and publishing e-books through
Part One,
Part Two,
Part Three,
Part Four,
Part Five, and
Part Six. It's an entire course in how to make books including the writing stage and all of the software that
MacNN recommends after months of testing and several books in the making. Now that we've completed the series we can also –– small spoiler, sorry –– reveal that we pulled it off: we did write and publish a new book in this week and you can
buy Pointers: iWork Pages, Numbers and Keynote on iBooks right now.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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