E-Book Conversions, vol 1

Jun 11, 2012 by Lona

I’ve been working on converting a manuscript into an e-book for a client. Mind you, not really my area of expertise, but I am learning an awful lot about the process.

Mostly, that I am not very good at it.

OK, in my defense, though, I am actually fully trained in Photoshop and while I can’t bill myself as an expert, I’m definitely in the advanced group. That said, I’ve never touched InDesign before in my life. And that’s a bit of a problem here.

I’ve worked with Illustrator, and hell, way back in the day, I worked with PageMaker. (Oy, my age is showing.) But I’ve never worked with InDesign before. Not once. This is making for an interesting project.

Obviously, the internet is my best friend in this situation, and I’m learning as I go, but I have new respects for those who do this for a living. The pagination is horrendous to get straight, the way of setting up your heading and body styles was designed by a chimp with a bucket on it’s head, and the system for putting together a table of contents is more convoluted than most stereo instructions.

Sadly, I understand stereo instructions just fine. I think my problem here is that it looks so much like Photoshop I keep trying to use Photoshop key commands.

I think I have a ways to go.