More specifically, alternatives for Those DeWolfes authors. Ever since we moved to the electronic payments with the Kindle store, we’ve had problems. I won’t get into the details right now, but it has been a giant pain in our side. I’m also keen to use the sales portal for Those DeWolfes that Shawn designed which takes away the big benefit of Kindle — the exclusive promotion period and a HUGE audience — but gives us unlimited flexibility to offer specials, coupons, or other promotions.
Being in the Kindle store has other benefits of course; Amazon is often the first place people look for books. However, with our own sales portal plus Smashwords for greater distribution, we should be OK. The one drawback to Smashwords is this: “ if the book contains buy links to Amazon or other retailers, we can’t distribute it.” [source] — so we will have to settle for links to our author pages in the back matter.
Right now, what this means is finding the best way to build an EPUB. I could code straight HTML, but I would far prefer a friendlier interface. Sigil offers that. Calibre allegedly does too, but the three files I attempted to translate to epub came out so ridiculously garbled they were unusable. I am trying to find others who have used Sigil — I like the idea of having more control over my product rather than having Smashwords crunch through a Word file.
Sigil is a reader but also has editing capabilities. It is open source and creative commons and multi-platform friendly (above is a Linux screenshot). My hope is that I will be able to use it to manhandle the images much more easily than in Word.
I also like knowing I can check the final product for problems myself through online (or downloadable) validators using EpubCheck, before I submit the finished design.
I’ll likely give this a shot very soon and write more once I know sort out the best option.
If you’ve already used Sigil, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Epub Reader Sigil by Linux Screenshots on Flickr. CC-BY xmodulo.com