What you need:Sigil; PageEdit Time required: 2-3 hours
These days you don’t need a publishing deal to distribute a book you’ve written, nor commit to the upfront cost of printing copies without any guaranteed sales in place. Thanks to the continuing popularity of ebook readers like the Kobo and Kindle, you can publish digitally for zero cost and then look to promote your work online.
The hardest part of the job is taking your finished draft – typically in a Microsoft Word document – and converting it into a format that flows on any screen, whether PC, phone, tablet or ebook reader. The solution lies in an open-source program called Sigil, which takes your text (and any images you may have included) and transforms it into a standard EPUB file, which is compatible with a variety of mobile devices, from Kobo e-readers to tablets and even phones. You can also export your book in a format you can convert to the AZW3 format used by Amazon Kindles.
1Set up Sigil
Visit www.snipca.com/48211, where you’ll find download links for Windows (64bit only, requires Windows 10 version 1809 or later), Mac and Linux. Microsoft Defender might warn you about Sigil, but it’s safe to use so click More Info, then ‘Run anyway’.
Open Sigil and you’ll see a three-paned window. In the left-hand pane is the Book Browser ( 1in our screenshot top of page 36). This reveals the structure of an EPUB file, which is in fact a ZIP file with an .epub file extension. Inside the file is everything required for your ebook, organised into self-explanatory folders. The Text folder contains your book’s text (formatted in XHTML), while various resources from Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to physical images sit in their own folders.
In the middle pane 2is the code editor, showing you the XHTML and CSS that makes up your pages and style sheets. On the right 3you’ll see a preview of what your file looks like, showing changes as you make them.
Sigil isn’t really suited as a tool for creating your book from scratch – its own editor requires you to work with the underlying XHTML code and rely on the Preview pane to check your edits as you go. Most people prefer working with a WYSIWYG editor, but before we get to that, let’s look at some basic concepts about formatting books for reading on Kindles and other devices.
2Get your text ready
Whatever formatting you used when writing your book has to be discarded or amended to suit the EPUB format. Most popular ebook formats, including EPUB and AZW3, are
