Witcherley Books

Great Stories - Fantastic Characters - Quality Puzzles

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  • Winner Independent Audiobook Awards Fantasy #loveaudio
    Congratulations to Tim Campbell for winning the Independent Audiobook Awards (IAA) Fantasy for his fantastic narration of #fantasy #cozymystery Inspector Hobbes and the Bones by Wilkie Martin. We are absolutely thrilled he has won – we knew he was awesome. The Independent Audiobook Awards, the #IAA2019, are awarded at the HearNow Festival in Kansas, USA […]
  • How to Setup Redirects to Audiobook Shops
    Stores like Amazon, Audible and Kobo have different pages for different countries which means that including product page links can require a lot of clickable links to be added per page if you want to take browsers to the right retailer for their location and if you don’t want to always default to the .com […]
  • How to Lay Out Your Book In MS Word
    Loading The Book’s Text We start with our fiction books in MS Word with no layout settings, then we run through a number of steps to tidy it up and lay it out as a paperback/hardback. This is a checklist of the steps to format a fiction book (i.e. a book of text, one without […]
  • #1 Proofreading Top Tip
    When proofreading your book it is easy to read what you expect the text to say instead of what it actually says, especially if you are the author. This can mean that you ‘read’ words that aren’t in the text, or fail to spot some spelling mistakes, seeing what they should be and not what […]
  • Example of How To Layout Paperback for KDP Print (was CreateSpace )
    We’ve previously posted the settings we use for the POD printer LightningSource, but we also use CreateSpace for POD printing as doing so means paperbacks alway show as currently available for immediate delivery on Amazon. Like other POD printers, CreateSpace has defined margins required during the book setup. Their’s allow for smaller margins than LightningSource […]
  • Example of How to Layout a PaperBack for LightningSource
    One of the POD printers we use to produce our paperbacks is LightningSource. This has strict settings for the margins on the books or the book is rejected in setup. Their file creation guide gives details on what needs to be setup https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/file-requirements-for-ebooks They recommend 0.5″ or 13mm on each side, plus 0.125″ (3mm) bleed, […]
  • Where to Use Book2Look Biblet and Add a Preview Book Option
    Following a openday at Nielsen BookData where they introduced the Book2Look biblets (http://www.book2look.com) we immediately got some for our books. The Book2Look biblets are ‘the most advanced online marketing tool available for publishers’. We’d seen them before in the Nielsen newsletters but had initially thought the starter package of £150 for 5 was the price […]
  • Distribution Plan for an Independent Publisher for eBooks and POD
    Before we started our publishing journey we considered how we expected to print and distribute books. This is the outline plan we put together. It focuses on distributing to Amazon as paperbacks and ebooks, and considers the routes to make books available more widely as paperbacks to online and physical bookshops. It assumes paperbacks are […]
  • Generating Book Interior PDF for LightningSource with Adobe Acrobat XI Pro
    LightningSource printing can be used for print-on-demand (POD) books, or for small print runs. Their book setup requires the cover and the interior to be loaded separately. The cover has to be built to a specific size and their website has a template generator (https://myaccount.lightningsource.com/Portal/Tools/CoverTemplateGenerator) to produce the right size of cover for the type […]
  • ePUB to MOBI in 5 Steps on Windows Platform
    Here is a simple method showing how to convert your book from ePUB into a MOBI file for Amazon Kindles. It can use the same steps as for a conversion from MS Word. If you have a lot of photos and pictures, or weird or fixed layouts then this won’t be quite right for you, […]
  • QuarkXpress 9.5.4 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for ePUB
    We have just finished creating and checking the ePUB files for our latest book: Inspector Hobbes and the Gold Diggers by Wilkie Martin. And we thought we’d share the formatting we have used for it. In our earlier post Building an ePUB with QuarkXpress 9.5.4 and Sigil (https://witcherleybooks.com/2020/02/22/building-an-epub-with-quarkxpress-9-5-4-and-sigil/) we described how we format ePUBs in […]
  • MS Word to MOBI in 7 Steps on Windows Platform
    Here is a simple method showing how to convert your book from MS Word into a MOBI file for Amazon Kindles. If you have a lot of photos and pictures, or weird layouts then this won’t be quite right for you, but if you have a text or fiction book with a few pictures this […]
  • Centering Text for an ePUB
    This is how we center the text for our ePUB files. After creating our ePUB files we found that the centering of text didn’t always work – even on devices where we’d tested the ePUB files during the build. This is due to the ePUB that eventually ends up on the ereading device going through […]
  • Building an ePUB with QuarkXpress 9.5.4 and Sigil
    There are many ways to get to an ePUB – this covers just one way of building them and is the method we’ve used. It may not be the best or most efficient, and it also requires a number of software packages. Though if you are interested in what you are getting for your money […]
  • Useful Programs for ePUB Creation
    We have recently started converting our books for ePUB format, and, although we’ve not used all the following, these are the programs we looked at using to create the files. Although we are novices at ePUB creation, with a background in IT and in software development we are sufficiently familiar with using diverse tools, reading […]
  • Reading About ePub
    We thought we’d better find out a bit about ePub files before we started converting our Kindle ebooks. Mainly because there are many more devices and retail sites to cater for when building ePub. Originally with just Kindle files, we only had one device supplier to consider, and as we’d used Amazon’s kindlegen program to […]
  • Success Creating Our First Book2Look Biblet
    We wanted a nice widget to show off our book content, and have now successfully created our first one using the book2look website (http://book2look.com). It was pretty easy to do but we had a couple of false starts as we’d not quite got all the information together, and also hadn’t realized we needed to publicize […]
  • Background Reading on Publishing and Business
    In preparation for generating books and ebooks and undertaking marketing and book promotion we’ve read quite a few books on publishing and on business generally. All of these have been added to our GoodReads shelf – here is a link to our background reading shelf with the ratings on how useful we’ve found them, or […]

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Note

This blog was migrated from witcherleybooks.wordpress.com in February 2020. Posts that we still refer back to, or that others new to publishing are using, have been reposted here.