First Experience with Printing and eBook Publishing, part 1

For a few days now I've been struggling to get my finished comic pages ready for print and ebook publishing. This is probably a good subject to blog about, so I'll try to summarize the end results.

Using Mobipocket Creator To Prepare PRC file for Kindle Direct Publishing

Relevant Links:
Michael Jasper's guide on preparing comics for Kindle
KindleGen and Kindle Previewer
Mobipocket Creator
a forum post about adding TOC in Mobipocket Creator
Creating NCX File

Premise: Kindle Direct Publishing wants a PRC format file and not PDF. Frustrated? Tough!

Start from a template
Michael Jasper's guide was a good starting point. If there had been better templates out there for comics I would have used them too, but this is what I got. The first hurdle is to edit the content of their HTML file to match my own comic. What's the difficult part? Well, they only had 22 pages to list in the HTML while I had 176. So I wrote a PHP script to do this mindless labor, just because I'm not very savvy with automation scripts such as Automator or AutoHotKey, etc. Now you can keep this HTML file as "IMAL_01.html", but after failing a few times (not the fault of this file name), I decided to rename it to a simpler "book.html", according to some post.

Important Edits
Do you want to add chapter markers or other segment markers such as page 10, 20, 30? In Michael's template above, those "a name=''" tags are used for this purpose. Mark them now, so that later on you can refer to them in a TOC.

Download software
You might not use Mobipocket Creator, but that's what KDP suggested. I resisted at first, tried KindleGen, but could not find enough information to clear all the warnings/errors. The other thing to download is Kindle Previewer (KindleGen is on that page too), which is useful to test out the PRC file if you don't have access to an actual Kindle.

Play around With Mobipocket Creator
...or not if you're impatient. You might have to redo some work after messing up. The software is strangely touchy.

Import necessary files

1. import "book.html"; I tried importing a pre-made PDF of the comic, but it ended badly
2. click on "Table of Contents" option and add one, so that a "Table of Contents" file appears in the "Production Files" list. (I tried to eliminate this step but then the Kindle Previewer's "TOC" button fails to work)
3. import all image files except the cover (or include it if you really want)
4. cover page is added separately as "Cover Image"

Book settings and Metadata
Easy.

Three main Kindle Previewer buttons to implement
When you open Kindle Previewer, you'll see three buttons that:

• access "cover" (got it working!)
• access "table of contents" (got it working!)
• access "NCX file" (no, I'm a total failure!)

Access "Cover"
This is easy to implement, just make sure you add "Cover Image", and click "Update" at the bottom of that dialog panel.

Access "Table of Contents"
This is trickier. My entire HTML file is full of images and nearly no text (other than a TOC, which I moved to the beginning, instead of as the last thing). When the software finds all the "a name" anchor tags in the HTML file it has no text to use as link text, so you will see a bullet list of nothingness. My workaround is to disregard the generated "Table of Contents" file (mbp_toc.html) and use my own. See below for visual demonstration:

(just keep this file alive and error free, but don't let it generate confusing text/lnks)

(I crossed out that title because it might be generated by the software as a side effect, not intentional)

(if you move these links to the beginning of the HTML, it will be near the front; the template has it near the end)

Access NCX
I tried to follow this guide, but my efforts keep getting overwritten by the software during rebuild, so I gave up. If you know a solution, feel free to share with us newbies! :)


Or if you need clarification on anything mentioned above, feel free to leave a comment.


Continue reading part 2.