Out authors write in MultiMarkdown. This allows us, with a build file, a standard config & templates, to use Pandoc to produce neat clean ePub’s. We can then convert these using the Calibre command line utility into a MOBI for Kindle.

If necessary (as we do) you can re-write some bits of the ePub with XMLStarlet
e.g. for UUID or a cover for Kindle when converted.

Wrap all this up in a small script and you can go from the authors MultiMarkdown files into ePub and MOBI in a few minutes ;-)

Thank you for the tip of using Prince! Prince XML seems like the perfect way for me to create a professional looking PDF!

Happy to hear you landed on Prince, that’s what I use for document generation. Prince is great but it’s like a $3500 polyfill for bad CSS3 paged media support in browsers.

I look forward to the day where I won’t be needing Prince for my work. It seems that there are enough parties who would have an interest in improving this aspect of browser support (I’m thinking Apple and Amazon). It’s not a sexy subject but making HTML output to paper in a good way will ultimately make it the ultimate archiving language, moreso than it already is.

Long after proprietary .docx and .pages formats have faded, structured HTML documents will be able to be machine and human-read.

Self publishing is much more profitable than going the “old school” traditional route. I tried both approaches and now creating video and subscriptions to content is more profitable than book publishing.
Cheers,
Matthew Rings
CEO & Founder
DBL07.co

I am co-authoring a book and we were debating between self-publishing and hiring a publisher. Thanks for the breakdown on self-publishing. We will start work along these lines!

I’m currently working on a book and looking to use Leanpub. It’s a great system and allows the book to be written in Markdown

Marie: I haven’t run into anything with the conversion process and haven’t had any complaints or concerns from anybody who purchased the book through Amazon. As mentioned in the article, you do want to consider how rich of an experience you want to create for EPUB. The richer it is, the less it’ll port over to other platforms.

For example, I originally considered embedding video into the EPUB version but the ability to port to multiple formats was very limiting. I decided to leave the video out.

Stephen Holdaway: I tried wkhtmltopdf but, at the time, it didn’t support as many of the CSS features that Prince did and that I was already using to style the book with. As a result, I left it by the wayside. It might be worth revisiting.

Jonathan: Thanks, that’s good to know.

I’m not planning on using too rich an epub experience; it’s a novel not something more interactive than that.

Brilliant walkthrough of how to publish a book. I must admit though, that I expected tips on the actual writing/editing process of a book directed towards a technical audience :-)

But definitely interesting!

Great post AND great ebook. As somebody who dabbles with ebooks too, i’d also strongly suggest ensuring the epub validates using epubcheck. I suggest testing on the popular apple/windows and android readers too.

Also the mobileread site is wealth of advice and tips http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Main_Page

Cheers