Convert my book for sale on iBooks?

[Michael]

Signing up for Smashwords is probably your best bet. You can then download the book in pretty much any file format you want.

[Patti (baconater)]

Our resident geek Geoff may be able to help.

I'll email him and direct him to this thread for you, Martin. :)

[Kath]

um... your book has been/is at the moment free, so i am assuming that you are currently enrolled in KDP and isn't one of the conditions that you can't sell it elsewhere only amazon?

might be wrong though...

[Patti (baconater)]

That's right Kath.

If it's enrolled in KDP it can't be sold elsewhere until after the 90 day term.

[Geoff (G. Robbins) (merda constat variat altitudo)]

If you have your book in HTML format, this can be loaded straight into Word and then saved into either .doc or docx format, whichever Smashwords is happy with.

If you don't have Word then let me know and we can sort something out.

When you upload the file onto Smashwords it automatically converts to all the formats it supports including Apple. I understand that Smashwords autmatically links in with the Apple store, but my experience says that this doesn't happen and I can't figure out how to trigger it. Some are saying that the price is key, having to end in 99 cents. Not sure if that is true.

[Patti (baconater)]

Geoff (G. Robbins) (The noisy passionfruit) wrote: "If you have your book in HTML format, this can be loaded straight into Word and then saved into either .doc or docx format, whichever Smashwords is happy with.

If you don't have Word then let me k..."

*tosses flowers at the geek's feet*

[Geoff (G. Robbins) (merda constat variat altitudo)]

LOL. I seem to have created more questions than I've answered Patti. Better hold the flowers.

[Patti (baconater)]

Well as you have trod all over them, I'd better get fresh ones, eh?

Grief.

[Steve]

You can set a first line indent in Word, Michael. That will change the first line of all your paragraphs in one go so no need to do them all manually. I don't know about Createspace but you generally have to format your book a little differently for each format, be it Kindle or Smashwords or Paperback so Word becomes pretty important to you in terms of getting your book to look right in the various formats.

EDIT: You can set the first line indent in Format>Paragraph>Indents and spacing. Set the value in 'Special' and it will affect any selected text. Might be best to select the entire document and change the few things you didn't want to change back to how they were. Formatting a book for publication can be tedious, but it's well worth the effort. Best of luck.

[Steve]

I use Scrivener, too, on a Mac. That's what I have to do every time. I just wish I knew how to get Scrivener to keep the indents. There must be a way.

[J.S.]

This has veered away from the original topic, which was a few days ago now, BUT I hit the exact same error this morning, so I thought I'd come back on it.

The problem is nothing to do with the date - that is a red herring!

The problem is to do with Calibre outputting a later epub format than that supported \ required by Apple.

The fix is to set the 'Preserve Cover Aspect Ratio' flag.

From the Calibre command line client:

ebook-convert my_book.mobi my_book.epub --preserve-cover-aspect-ratio

(You can set this flag via the Calibre UI as well... but I'm not sure how!!)