Creating The Little Book of the Icelanders

A reader on our Facebook page asked if I could write about the production of the book and what was involved – which I am happy to do!

First of all, I wrote all the text in Word. When I had it the way I wanted it [i.e. after endless rewrites, tweaks, insertions, deletions, etc.] I sent it to EPI who started working with it in InDesign.

We decided that we wanted the cover and design to rhyme with the last book, so he used that as a starting point. Like he does with every book he designs, EPI considered what the book is about and who it’s for. Since it’s an eBook, it needed to have fonts that were very readable, so EPI chose Baskerville for the body since it’s easy to read, both small and large [i.e. in a zoomed-in version].

Because the book is written on a humorous note, some designers might have selected a font that was kind of wacky or flippant; however, EPI felt that a classic, attractive font would provide the right sort of understatement to allow the humour to come through on its own terms. For the headings he chose Rockwell because it’s dissimilar to Baskerville but also has serifs [I'm assured that font nerds will understand what that means]. Basically, EPI tried to use attractive, classic fonts that would read well in an eBook, and to avoid ornamentation since that might come out mangled when it came time to code the book for eReaders [which is, in fact, what happened, and we had to go back and adjust the original file].

Unfortunately some of the formatting didn’t carry over from Word [most notably all the words and sentences in italics] so all that had to be gone through and manually inserted again.

Once that was done, we had to do some research to find out how to make an interactive Table of Contents – i.e. where you could click on the titles of the chapters and it would take you to those chapters in the book.

The first thing was to go through and label the chapter headings again, since that hadn’t carried over from Word. Then we needed to figure out how to create the TOC. Finally we’d done everything we were supposed to, but it still wasn’t working. That resulted in an evening of intense hair-pulling, since we really couldn’t figure out what we were doing wrong. We finally discovered we’d forgotten to check two little boxes in InDesign that specified that we wanted to export hyperlinks. [argh!]

This was not an uncommon occurrence in the production process.

When the book was ready in InDesign, we exported it as a PDF file. The file had to be locked, to prevent copying, changes etc. Then we needed to start working on the version of the book that would work for eReaders.

That was a chapter unto itself.

The text had to be imported into an eBook editor, called Sigil. I had already tried transferring the Word files to Sigil, but it took along so much extra coding crap that I basically gave up. In Sigil, each chapter needs to be a separate section, and with 50 chapters plus introduction, plus title page etc., there were 54 sections. Each section contains lines of code, and the relevant code – the stuff that actually makes the eBook – is maybe 200 lines long for each section. However, when it was imported from Word, it was around 2,000 lines of code per section. In other words, a colossal mess.

Happily I discovered that I could export the file as ePub from InDesign, by doing something called a cross-media export. That resulted in much cleaner code, but still required that each chapter be broken up into a separate section. Also, all the formatting disappeared when the text was imported, so all that had to be gone through manually – again.

Once the book was coded, I had to run a test, called “validation”, to make sure there were no errors in it. Alas, there were several, so I had to figure out what the messages I was getting meant, and how to fix them. After numerous forum posts on nerdy eBook coding sites [with incredibly helpful members!] I discovered that, among other things, the errors were due to the fact that the right fonts needed to be embedded in the eBook, if it was to look anything similar to the PDF book.

With EPI assisting, I managed to import Baskerville but not Rockwell, so the headings in the ePub version look a little different from the PDF version. However, it’s not a big difference, and it didn’t seem worth banging my head against the wall for an indefinite length of time just to get it right. The default font works just fine, I think, and is not that different from the PDF heading font.

Incidentally, while Sigil does a pretty good job as an eBook editor [it's open source, which means it's a work in progress ... e-publishing is still a young art and very much in formation] it doesn’t show you how the book will look once it’s finished. For that you have to keep opening it in another application. Initially I used Calibre, which seems to be the most common application for doing this, but it was acting a bit funky, lines were missing in the display, etc. So after a few more forum posts, I discovered that Adobe has a vastly superior ePub reader, called Adobe Digital Reader. So after installing and viewing my book in that, and of course going back and making endless tweaks, etc., I was good to go.

So that’s pretty much it. Of course I’ve skipped over many of the smaller details [not wishing to bore you with those] but suffice it to say that this was incredibly educational. And I’m delighted to be able to offer a version for eReaders this time around, since many people were calling for that with the last book.