It may be confusing to you unless you have Scrivener right in front of you and you’re able to decipher these instructions.
This is a REALLY BRIEF overview of what I did. Using Amazon’s Kindlegen, you can output to a mobi file that you can upload directly for publication. Note that this is pretty much the same as what you’ll want to do for an ebook compile. Saves time and complexity, not to mention the unwanted duplication of effort and potential creeping errors of exporting to intermediate formats. You might want to check that out as an alternative, but really, the whole point of this blog post is to tell you that you can do everything you need to without leaving Scrivener. You’ll have to figure out your cover using their Cover Creator, though as of yesterday morning, Amazon has released a new desktop application called Kindle Create for formatting print books.
You should now have a PDF version of your book that will happily load into Amazon for printing. Have a look at the preview and if it looks good, click the little PDF drop down in the bottom and select Save as PDF. You’re not going to a printer though, unless you have a lot of 5.25×8 pages in there (hint, that’s half of an 8.5×11 printed in landscape). This shouldn’t surprise you, because you had “Print” selected in step 1. You might want to check the title prefixes and suffixes and how Scrivener is going to handle your first paragraph formatting.ĥ) Once your styles are to your liking, Save the preset and click Assign Section Layouts at the bottom of the Compile page (see graphic in step 1 above) and you should be ready to build your book.Ħ) Click Compile (again see graphic in step 1 above), you’re presented with something that looks suspiciously like a printer dialog. This part’s a bit fiddly as you have to identify the different parts you’ll be using and tweak to taste using the formatting toolbar in the lower right preview section. I have a particular look for my books with sans serif, left justified chapter and section headers. Confused? Don’t worry about it.Ĥ) Adjust styles to taste. Scrivener mirrors those margins for left and right pages, so the left margin here becomes the right margin on left-side pages. If your book is particularly large (like 500+ pages), you may have to increase that left margin here. Note that Scrivener 3 can do “facing pages” on output and setting the gutters (inside margins) for print. Adjust your Margins too, though the defaults should be good enough. You might need to do some conversion to millimeters, (133×203). When you’re in the template’s settings, go to Page Setup and create the page size. Select “My Formats” to make this template visible to all your projects.ģ) I edited the new preset to create a 5.25″x8″ option for Amazon’s trade paperbacks. At the top is a drop down that lets you select Print as your compile target.Ģ) Clone the Paperback 5.06″x7.81″ setting with the little + button at the bottom of the Formats pane on the left. You will see a bunch of formatting presets In the left hand column. Tl dr – Scrivener 3’s new Paperback output format is fantastic and I was able to do the entire thing – except for the cover – from inside one program.ġ) Open the Compile sheet (File menu > Compile or Cmd-Opt-E). Now that Scrivener 3 is here, and there was a much-improved Compile option, I figured I’d give it a try to see if I could output a print edition of my books that would survive the trip into Amazon. It took hours to produce the final copy, which ended up looking pretty good, I must admit. Setting up pages in InDesign might be trivial for someone who uses it all the time, but for me, for a once every six months task, it’s like setting foot on the moon. Second, I need to produce an intermediary format (generally, a Word-alike) to import into InDesign and make sure all the formatting gets preserved along the way. First, I’d have to use a separate program outside of the thing I did the work in. Let me tell you, that was not an experience I wanted to revisit.
That doesn’t sound particularly onerous, but previously, the one print version I had of Trajectory Book 1 was done in Adobe’s InDesign.
I’ve had an item on my todo list for the past six months or so: Produce paperback editions of my books. It is a very solid release, so kudos and thank you to the team. It’s been 2 weeks since the arrival of Scrivener 3, and I am pleased to report that so far, it has been an absolute pleasure to use.