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Yay! Creating an EPUB fileįor this step, we’re going to use Pandoc (a free file converter tool) to create our EPUB file. If you have a PC, the steps will be similar but there are some details that will vary. It’s also great for doing a full read of your book, and for sharing with friends and family pre-publishing. For that, I’ll share some previewer tools that you can use. The most important step is reviewing and confirming that your formatting is correct.
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There are two main ebook formats - EPUB and MOBI.In order to publish our book, we’ll need to convert it to a format that includes all of the extra stuff necessary for our book including a table of contents, cover image, and metadata (which is just a fancy word for key attributes of your book like author, title, publisher, etc.). Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format.
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If you’ve never done this before, you’ll need to understand a few basic concepts. I’ll go into this more later, but for now, it’s worth noting that the two file formats we are targeting are EPUB (the ‘standard’ ebook format), and MOBI (what Amazon uses for their Kindle platform). Next, we’ll walk through how to create the files you need for Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iBooks, and just about every other publishing platform out there. In part one, we learned how to write and format your book in Markdown.
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