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Demon Hunter’s – Bikoo’s Ebook Workflow

Bikoo signed with Baku Yumemakura to provide a worldwide distribution service for the English translations of his books. The first book in the pipeline would be Demon Hunters: Desires of the Flesh — a carnal, violent, erotic, rip-roaring tumble through the underbelly of Japan, featuring sex-crazed Kung-Fu monks, Tachikawa Buddhism, Kukai (The self mummified corpse of Kobo-Daishi) and a man that puts a bear in a full nelson, slamming its head into a tree until it becomes a puddle of goo. Bikoo needed to develop an ebook workflow quickly.

Here is a quick breakdown of Bikoo’s ebook workflow. We’ll follow up this post with more detailed information about each section:

Google Docs

  1. Translate
  2. Proofread
  3. Edit
  4. Repeat
  5. Output to MS Word .docx format

Photoshop

  1. Create cover image 1560×2500
  2. Create title image 600×800
  3. Create map image 800×978

InDesign

  1. Create new web target document 768×1024 with 84px margins
  2. Place the .docx file in the new document save – this is the main content file
  3. Create new web target documents with 0 margin at 600x800px
  4. Place cover, map, and title image and save the new documents
  5. Create new web target document 768×1024 with 84px margins
  6. Enter copyright information and credits then save – this is the copyright page
  7. Create new web target document 768×1024 with 84px margins
  8. Keep blank for now and save – this will be the TOC page
  9. Create a new book document
  10. Add the cover, copyright, title, toc, map, and content pages
  11. Set the content page to be the main style page
  12. Open the content page
  13. Create italics character style
  14. Find and replace, search for local italics style ove16. rrides and replace with the 17. new italics character style
  15. Create paragraph styles for everything (Chapter, Subheading, Sub-chapter, Main, First line, etc)
  16. Format the content document
  17. Setup TOC styles: select chapter as your chapter. If the chapter paragraph style is set to break at a new page, set an override style for the TOC so that it doesn’t skip a page for every chapter
  18. Place the TOC into the TOC document
  19. Do a quick run-through and make sure eve20. rything is setup correctly
  20. Export to ePub

Sigil

  1. Open the ePub book
  2. Open the CSS stylesheet and delete anything not recognized by Kindle
  3. Add page-break-before : always; to chapter headings for page breaks before chapters
  4. Replace the images with original compressed files
  5. Fix TOC links and confirm they work as expected
  6. Save a copy

KindleGen 1.2
Versions of KindleGen greater than 1.2 have a bug that renders extra space between paragraphs on non-Kindle device Kindle Apps (iOS). KindleGen 1.2 does not have this issue.

  1. Use the command-line tool to output a compressed .mobi file

Kindle Previewer

  1. QA the look and feel of the book across multiple devices

PUBLISH!

Why does Bikoo go to so much trouble when we could just output a word document as html? Because eBooks are software. If you are going to be creating software, it’s important to make the software scalable, understandable, and easy to edit. With the above workflow, we get the best of both worlds: the layout flexibility of InDesign while still touching the raw code behind the eBook.

Demon Hunters: Desires of the Flesh is available on the Amazon Kindle store and is a Kindle Select title. If you enjoy the above write up, please download a copy of our book and leave a review to support great genre publishing!