07 March 2010 Last year, Craig Morgan Teicher wrote a series called “The Making of an eBook.” I thought aspiring self-publishers would like to see his process. However, as I read through it, I found it uninspiring.

Craig started his series discussing how his publisher approached him to do the project.

His second installment discusses his initial research. This included look at Smashwords and how one can hire a formatter to get your work into the right format. It references Smashwords Style Guide, and how Smashwords likes to help the publisher out. That followed with an article about how his publisher nixed Smashwords in favor of the Kindle format. His third installment explained why he had nothing to say, and pitched his book tour.

The fourth installment of the series discusses conversion steps from Word to ePub/Mobi formats. His process only helped underscore for me the reason why Word sucks as a novel author's platform. Reformat the book, use Dreamweaver, ZIP and send to publisher. This was followed with another article on eBook formatting. It really only mentions how to make a table of contents in HTML. Boring and wrong.

The sixth article (really the seventh), he gives advice on what to read to prepare a Kindle. His specific book is Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle, which looks to be a book worth having.

His seventh article addresses a class he's creating for epublishing and an plug for another ebook formatting agency. He then refers to his formatter, which was given to him by his publisher. He finishes by hinting about Smashwords again. He continues his informative romp with a plug for another book which talks about how to make market and sell ebooks for free. Yawn.

He had a chance to redeem himself in the next article, that instead discusses interacting with his publisher. Finally, after all that hard work of having other people do it, he discusses how is book is about ready to be put on Kindle. So far, nothing useful has been conveyed in the process of self-publishing. He moves on to upload his book, which only talks about how it took about 10 minutes to do so. Finally, the book is published, and he mentions it costs seven dollars—how he and his aunt both bought a copy.

That ended his discussion on making of an ebook.

I hope my articles are more helpful in the future.