If you're getting into writing and selling your own ebooks, whether that's a novel or any of the self-help or how-to type of ebooks you'll be delighted to find that you can get all the ebook producing software you need absolutely free.
It's another of the bonuses, like being able to manage everything yourself, that will help you as you build your successful ebook business.
Let's look at ebook producing software in a bit more detail. What you'll find, in fact, is that there's not very much you need at all.
First of all you need a way of entering text. A word processor. A very simple text editor like Wordpad could do the job but doesn't give you the flexibility you need to change text size, colour, indent paragraphs or any of the other formatting like adding page numbers, etc. However, it's a simple task to get something that has all the capabilities you need. Many computes have Microsoft Word installed and that will do the job nicely.
If you don't have Word you can get a very similar program completely free from openoffice.org.
That's the words taken care of (a few days typing later…). Now you need to turn your file into a document for everyone else. An actual ebook. We need something that
1. Is easy to deliver over the internet.
and
2. Can be read by any computer.
The answer is provided by PDF (portable document format), invented by Adobe.
You can go straight out and buy a copy of Adobe Acrobat, which creates PDFs, but it's quite expensive when you're just starting out. Fortunately there are several free programs that will do a basic but perfectly acceptable job that you can either use online or download to your pc. Just do a search for "free PDF creator".
That's it, you're done.
If you look around for other ebook producing software you'll probably find one or two programs that will claim to do this and that. They might seem more enticing, appear to have more bells and whistles. You might be tempted…
Don't do it! Anything other than PDF for creating your ebook is a waste of time. PDF is now universally accepted. Virtually every computer produced anywhere in the world can read PDF files. The very few that can't can download a free copy of the reader program from the Adobe website.
So why make life complicated?
It could be argued that you need something to produce a nice cover for your ebook. I would caution against it unless you're very good with graphics programs.
The problem is (and I'm the world's worst) that it's too easy to produce something a bit brash - a bit cheap and nasty. I might like it but everybody else either smiles politely or makes a face!
It's much better, I think, to either stick with simple but clear typed cover or to employ a professional to do your ebook cover for you. Check online, it's really not all that expensive.
Six months ago I would have stopped there. Now we have one other format that we do have to consider. It's the files used for Amazon's Kindle portable ebook reader. We need to consider this because it is potentially an enormous market.
