Book Editing & Formatting Services → Premium Book Editing Services with Bestselling Results. EBook formatting (Nook, Kindle, etc.). In today's guest post, indie author Teymour Shahabi explains how to find an editor for the draft of your self-published book and what to look for in an editing relationship. In traditional publishing, submitting your draft to an editor is an inevitable step on the road to bookstore shelves. But how much editing is. Indie author Teymour Shahabi explains how to find an editor for the draft of your self-published book and what to look for in a good editing relationship. The ebook needs to stand out from the majority of other ebooks on the market. You may need to look for ebook publishing tips to help market your book. A professional ebook. Author Note: This ebook was inspired, in part, by a discussion of a. This post generated a lot of questions from many about how to find this type of freelance writing / editorial work. Self-publishing is growing and I foresee becoming a big need over the next decade or so. So, I wrote this ebook to explain how to go about finding these types of projects. Most of them are free and/or very low cost. $7.95 OVERVIEW Like most of my ebooks, I wrote this one because I started receiving a lot of inquiries from subscribers to my various freelance writing blogs about how to land these types of gigs. This particular ebook was inspired by a post I wrote on InkwellEdiorial.com, my freelance writing blog, entitled (full post is pasted within). This entry sparked a lot of interest from readers. For example, one commentor wrote: Great post Yuwanda! Lots of good ideas to expand our reach, and a couple I had not considered, like ebook editing and writing special reports. I think as a follow up to this post, some may want to know the best places to find work in these various specialties. Like for example ebook editing, this is not a service that SEO/Web Design companies typically ask for. Any thoughts on what type of marketing works best to find people who need this service? Another wrote: Hi Yuwanda, Another useful, well-written and informative post, as always! But I do echo Paul’s comment about a possible follow-up with pointers on where writer’s might find e-book editing and special report writing jobs.... We obviously appreciate that it’s really up to the individual to seek out new work assignments, and markets, etc., and it takes a lot of time and work to come up with the best possible work opportunities and client resources. But with your experience so far, I’m sure a few extra hints and tips on likely places to find this work would be very much appreciated. Keep up the great work, meantime! As self-publishing is growing, I foresee a need for ebook writing services growing right along with it. And this type of editorial work can pay very well. How Much Can You Earn as an Ebook Writer / Editor? The least amount I’ve earned from an ebook writing / editing project is probably around $300. This was for editing an ebook of about 30 pages that a friend had written (I gave him a huge discount). And it was years ago – like 1999. He had very poor writing and grammar skills, but he published a small magazine and threw a lot of work my way, so I always gave him discount. The most is around $1,600 – for a 10-page ebook (special report) on social media for a client. They used it as a free giveaway for a seminar they were giving. I’ve given out ebook writing and editing job estimates for as much as $12,000 (yep, twelve thousand dollars!); however, most of my estimates have fallen in the $1,000 to $3,000 range for anywhere from 5 to 40 pages. If you scour the web, you’ll see prices all over the map – from a low of $1 per page, to a high of $60,000 or more for ebooks of 200+ pages. As you can see, ebook writing can be very lucrative. Hence, I thought I’d share my experiences and thoughts on how to go about finding this type of work. Following is a complete Table of Contents. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE, Page 2 How Much Can You Earn as an Ebook Writer / Editor, Page 3 Article: 10 Types of Digital Freelance Writing Jobs: They’re “Hot” and They Pay Well – Here’s What They Are, Page 4 What You’ll Learn in This Ebook, Page 8 SECTION I: How to Market for Ebook Editing and Writing Jobs, Page 13 Marketing Method #1 (Cost: $0), Page 14 How to Quickly Build an Ebook Writing/Editing Prospect List Using This Method, Page 14 Land 36 Ebook Writing / Editing Jobs a Year? Note A video tour of the calibre editor is available. When you first open a book with the Edit book tool, you will be presented with a list of files on the left. These are the individual HTML files, stylesheets, images, etc. That make up the content of the book. Simply double click on a file to start editing it. Note that if you want to do anything more sophisticated than making a few small tweaks, you will need to know and. As you make changes to the HTML or CSS in the editor, the changes will be previewed, live, in the preview panel to the right. When you are happy with how the changes you have made look, click the Save button or use File → Save to save your changes into the e-book. One useful feature is Checkpoints. Before you embark on some ambitious set of edits, you can create a checkpoint. The checkpoint will preserve the current state of your book, then if in the future you decide you don’t like the changes you have made to you can go back to the state when you created the checkpoint. To create a checkpoint, use Edit → Create checkpoint. Checkpoints will also be automatically created for you whenever you run any automated tool like global search and replace. The checkpointing functionality is in addition to the normal undo/redo mechanism when editing individual files. Checkpoints are useful for when changes are spread over multiple files in the book. That is the basic work flow for editing books – Open a file, make changes, preview and save. The rest of this manual will discuss the various tools and features present to allow you to perform specific tasks efficiently. The File browser gives you an overview of the various files inside the book you are editing. The files are arranged by category, with text (HTML) files at the top, followed by stylesheet (CSS) files, images and so on. Simply double click on a file to start editing it. Editing is supported for HTML, CSS and image files. The order of text files is the same order that they would be displayed in, if you were reading the book. All other files are arranged alphabetically. By hovering your mouse over an entry, you can see its size, and also, at the bottom of the screen, the full path to the file inside the book. Note that files inside e-books are compressed, so the size of the final book is not the sum of the individual file sizes. Many files have special meaning, in the book. These will typically have an icon next to their names, indicating the special meaning. For example, in the picture to the left, you can see that the files cover_image.jpg and titlepage.xhtml have the icon of a cover next to them, this indicates they are the book cover image and titlepage. Similarly, the content.opf file has a metadata icon next to it, indicating the book metadata is present in it and the toc.ncx file has a T icon next to it, indicating it is the Table of Contents. You can perform many actions on individual files, by right clicking them. You can rename an individual file by right clicking it and selecting Rename. Renaming a file automatically updates all links and references to it throughout the book. So all you have to do is provide the new name, calibre will take care of the rest. You can also bulk rename many files at once. This is useful if you want the files to have some simple name pattern. For example you might want to rename all the HTML files to have names Chapter-1.html, Chapter-2.html and so on. Select the files you want bulk renamed by holding down the Shift or Ctrl key and clicking the files. Then right click and select Bulk rename. Enter a prefix and what number you would like the automatic numbering to start at, click OK and you are done. Finally, you can bulk change the file extension for all selected files. Select multiple files, as above, and right click and choose Change the file extension for the selected files. Sometimes, you may want to merge two HTML files or two CSS files together. It can sometimes be useful to have everything in a single file. Be wary, though, putting a lot of content into a single file will cause performance problems when viewing the book in a typical e-book reader. To merge multiple files together, select them by holding the Ctrl key and clicking on them (make sure you only select files of one type, either all HTML files or all CSS files and so on). Then right click and select merge. That’s all, calibre will merge the files, automatically taking care of migrating all links and references to the merged files. Note that merging files can sometimes cause text styling to change, since the individual files could have used different stylesheets. E-books typically have a cover image. This image is indicated in the File browser by the icon of a brown book next to the image name. If you want to designate some other image as the cover, you can do so by right clicking on the file and choosing Mark as cover. In addition, EPUB files has the concept of a titlepage. A title page is a HTML file that acts as the title page/cover for the book. You can mark an HTML file as the titlepage when editing EPUBs by right-clicking. Be careful that the file you mark contains only the cover information. If it contains other content, such as the first chapter, then that content will be lost if the user ever converts the EPUB file in calibre to another format. This is because when converting, calibre assumes that the marked title page contains only the cover and no other content. Edit book has a very powerful search and replace interface that allows you to search and replace text in the current file, across all files and even in a marked region of the current file. You can search using a normal search or using regular expressions. To learn how to use regular expressions for advanced searching, see. Start the search and replace via the Search → Find/replace menu entry (you must be editing an HTML or CSS file). Type the text you want to find into the Find box and its replacement into the Replace box. You can the click the appropriate buttons to Find the next match, replace the current match and replace all matches. Using the drop downs at the bottom of the box, you can have the search operate over the current file, all text files, all style files or all files. You can also choose the search mode to be a normal (string) search or a regular expression search. You can count all the matches for a search expression via Search → Count all. The count will run over whatever files/regions you have selected in the dropdown box. You can also go to a specific line in the currently open editor via Search → Go to line. You can save frequently used search/replace expressions and reuse them multiple times. To save a search simply right click in the Find box and select Save current search. You can bring up the dialog of saved searches via Search → Saved searches. This will present you with a list of search and replace expressions that you can apply. You can even select multiple entries in the list by holding down the Ctrl Key while clicking so as to run multiple search and replace expressions in a single operation. There is a dedicated tool to ease editing of the Table of Contents. Launch it with Tools → Table of Contents → Edit Table of Contents. The Edit Table of Contents tool shows you the current Table of Contents (if any) on the left. Simply double click on any entry to change its text. You can also re-arrange entries by drag and drop or by using the buttons to the right. For books that do not have a pre-existing Table of Contents, the tool gives you various options to auto-generate a Table of Contents from the text. You can generate from the headings in the document, from links, from individual files and so on. You can edit individual entries by clicking on them and then clicking the Change the location this entry points to button. This will open up a mini-preview of the book, simply move the mouse cursor over the book view panel, and click where you want the entry to point to. A thick green line will show you the location. Click OK once you are happy with the location. The Check Book tool searches your book for problems that could prevent it working as intended on actual reader devices. Activate it via Tools → Check Book. Any problems found are reported in a nice, easy to use list. Clicking any entry in the list shows you some help about that error as well as giving you the option to auto-fix that error, if the error can be fixed automatically. You can also double click the error to open the location of the error in an editor, so you can fix it yourself. Some of the checks performed are. • Malformed HTML markup. Any HTML markup that does not parse as well-formed XML is reported. Correcting it will ensure that your markup works as intended in all contexts. Calibre can also auto-fix these errors, but auto-fixing can sometimes have unexpected effects, so use with care. As always, a checkpoint is created before auto-fixing so you can easily revert all changes. Auto-fixing works by parsing the markup using the HTML5 algorithm, which is highly fault tolerant and then converting to well formed XML. • Malformed or unknown CSS styles. Any CSS that is not valid or that has properties not defined in the CSS 2.1 standard (plus a few from CSS 3) are reported. CSS is checked in all stylesheets, inline style attributes and. This tool simply converts HTML that cannot be parsed as XML into well-formed XML. It is very common in e-books to have non-well-formed XML, so this tool simply automates the process of fixing such HTML. The tool works by parsing the HTML using the HTML5 algorithm (the algorithm used in all modern browsers) and then converting the result into XML. Be aware that auto-fixing can sometimes have counter-intuitive results. If you prefer, you can use the Check Book tool discussed above to find and manually correct problems in the HTML. Accessed via Tools → Fix HTML. Note In HTML any text can have significant whitespace, via the CSS white-space directive. Therefore, beautification could potentially change the rendering of the HTML. To avoid this as far as possible, the beautify algorithm only beautifies block level tags that contain other block level tags. So, for example, text inside a tag will not have its whitespace changed. But a tag that contains only other and tags will be beautified. This can sometimes mean that a particular file will not be affected by beautify as it has no suitable block level tags. In such cases you can try different beautification tools, that are less careful, for example:. Normally in e-books, the Table of Contents is separate from the main text and is typically accessed via a special Table of Contents button/menu in the e-book reading device. You can also have calibre automatically generate an inline Table of Contents that becomes part of the text of the book. It is generated based on the currently defined Table of Contents. If you use this tool multiple times, each invocation will cause the previously created inline Table of Contents to be replaced. The tool can be accessed via Tools → Table of Contents → Insert inline Table of Contents. Checkpoints are a way to mark the current state of the book as “special”. You can then go on to do whatever changes you want to the book and if you don’t like the results, return to the checkpointed state. Checkpoints are automatically created every time you run any of the automated tools described in the previous section. You can create a checkpoint via Edit → Create checkpoint. And go back to a previous checkpoint with Edit → Revert to The check pointing functionality is in addition to the normal Undo/redo mechanism when editing individual files. Checkpoints are particularly useful for when changes are spread over multiple files in the book or when you wish to be able to revert a large group of related changes as a whole. You can see a list of available checkpoints via View → Checkpoints. You can compare the current state of the book to a specified checkpoint using the tool – by selecting the checkpoint of interest and clicking the Compare button. The Revert to button restores the book to the selected checkpoint, undoing all changes since that checkpoint was created. The File preview gives you an overview of the various files inside The live preview panel shows you the changes you are making live (with a second or two of delay). As you edit HTML or CSS files, the preview panel is updated automatically to reflect your changes. As you move the cursor around in the editor, the preview panel will track its location, showing you the corresponding location in the book. Clicking in the preview panel, will cause the cursor in the editor to be positioned over the element you clicked. If you click a link pointing to another file in the book, that file will be opened in the edit and the preview panel, automatically. You can turn off the automatic syncing of position and live preview of changes – by buttons under the preview panel. The live update of the preview panel only happens when you are not actively typing in the editor, so as not to be distracting or slow you down, waiting for the preview to render. The preview panel shows you how the text will look when viewed. However, the preview panel is not a substitute for actually testing your book an actual reader device. It is both more, and less capable than an actual reader. It will tolerate errors and sloppy markup much better than most reader devices. It will also not show you page margins, page breaks and embedded fonts that use font name aliasing. Use the preview panel while you are working on the book, but once you are done, review it in an actual reader device or software emulator. One, perhaps non-obvious, use of the preview panel is to split long HTML files. While viewing the file you want to split, click the split mode button under the preview panel. Then simply move your mouse to the place where you want to split the file and click. A thick green line will show you exactly where the split will happen as you move your mouse. Once you have found the location you want, simply click and the split will be performed. Splitting the file will automatically update all links and references that pointed into the bottom half of the file and will open the newly split file in an editor. You can also split a single HTML file at multiple locations automatically, by right clicking inside the file in the editor and choosing Split at multiple locations. This will allow you to easily split a large file at all heading tags or all tags having a certain class and so on. The Live CSS panel shows you all the style rules that apply to the tag you are currently editing. The name of tag, along with its line number in the editor are displayed, followed by a list of matching style rules. It is a great way to quickly see which style rules apply to any tag. The view also has clickable links (in blue), which take you directly to the location where the style was defined, in case you wish to make any changes to the style rules. Style rules that apply directly to the tag, as well as rules that are inherited from parent tags are shown. The panel also shows you what the finally calculated styles for the tag are. Properties in the list that are superseded by higher priority rules are shown with a line through them. You can enable the Live CSS panel via View → Live CSS. Note You can double click a word to highlight the next occurrence of that word in the editor. This is useful if you wish to manually edit the word, or see what context it is in. To change a word, simply double click one of the suggested alternative spellings on the right, or type in your own corrected spelling and click the Change selected word to button. This will replace all occurrences of the word in the book. You can also right click on a word in the main word list to change the word conveniently from the right click menu. You can have the spelling checker ignore a word for the current session by clicking the Ignore button. You can also add a word to the user dictionary by clicking the Add to dictionary button. The spelling checker supports multiple user dictionaries, so you can select the dictionary you want the word added to. You can also have the spelling checker display all the words in your book, not just the incorrectly spelled ones. This is useful to see what words are most common in your book and to run a simple search and replace on individual words. This view shows you the HTML coding and CSS that applies to the current element of interest. You open it by right clicking a location in the preview panel and choosing Inspect. It allows you to see the HTML coding for that element and more importantly, the CSS styles that apply to it. You can even dynamically edit the styles and see what effect your changes have instantly. Note that editing the styles does not actually make changes to the book contents, it only allows for quick experimentation. The ability to live edit inside the Inspector is under development. When editing an e-book, one of the most tedious tasks is creating links to other files inside the book, or to CSS stylesheets, or images. You have to figure out the correct filename and relative path to the file. The editor has auto-complete to make that easier. As you type a filename, the editor automatically pops up suggestions. Simply use the Tab key to select the correct file name. The editor even offers suggestions for links pointing to an anchor inside another HTML file. After you type the # character, the editor will show you a list of all anchors in the target file, with a small snippet of text to help you choose the right anchor. Note that unlike most other completion systems, the editor’s completion system uses subsequence matching. This means that you can type just two or three letters from anywhere in the filename to complete the filename. For example, say you want the filename./images/arrow1.png, you can simply type ia1 and press Tab to complete the filename. When searching for matches, the completion system prioritizes letters that are at the start of a word, or immediately after a path separator. Once you get used to this system, you will find it saves you a lot of time and effort.
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