Publishing a Book
The chart shows three alternate routes for publishing books. First is to create a file using Microsoft Word or a similar software. This file should be constructed to suit the required publishing firm as per their specifications for margins and page numbers.
Once you get that book file in order, you should instruct Word to create a pdf file. Or you may use another program like Adobe Acrobat to create the pdf. The Word file in question should be a docx or doc file.
The pdf is what your printer requires for making the actual book either as a paperback or hardbound volume.
Believe it or not publishing a book as a soft cover paperback or as a hardbound edition is that simple.
The cover of the book is a different matter. That may be created by your printer or you may do that using an art or photo software like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign or a similar software. These programs will produce editable files in a file format which may be other than pdf. Whatever the case the printer will require the final cover file in pdf format. This means that if your art program cannot yield a pdf, you should use a program which can convert to pdf.
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The second and perhaps most important part of book publishing is to acquire an epub file which could be used to produce eBooks. There is no paper involved in such books.
You may take the docx (doc) file and convert that in epub or you may convert the pdf into epub. There are currently many free and paid-for software which do this conversion.
However if you require a hyperlinked index, you will have to use the docx file to create a txt file, which in turn you would use to create an html file. This html file will have the hyperlinks which you created for the index. This html file can be converted into an epub file if you use a program like Calibre, which is currently a free open source program.
That epub file would be suitable for eBooks.
It used to be that Amazon Kindle did not accept epub files but now that is the only file type which they accept for eBooks. Other vendors use the epub file as well.
Special Note:
I stated that one should make a txt file from the docx file which was created using Microsoft Word software. This means that all of the formatting in the docx file will be lost in that transition. Please secure a copy of the docx file which would retain the formatting. Use a duplicate to create the txt file. Once you have that you can use that plain text to create a clean html file.
You could instruct Word software to convert your docx file directly to html but if you do this the file will have extraneous markings on the code level of it, and that may cause your epub file which you will create to not pass the epub validation test.
I use Microsoft Expression Web 4 to create the code-clean html file. Dreamweaver from Adobe and other programs which are on par will also create the code-clean html file.
If you do not require a hyperlinked index there is no need to create the html file, you could find an online site or use software at your publisher/printer’s site to create the epub file directly from the pdf or even from the docx file.
