Oh I was going to suggest Sigil, but I generally just use it as a text editor and don’t really use its preview features. I think epubs generally are a huge pain to deal with, so wish you good luck!
I can see how Sigil would be useful to tinker under the hood, if one were so inclined, but it looks like it'd be awful to actually create the ebook in the first place. I've reverted to Scrivener, whose foibles are irritating but at least vaguely familiar.
Ah yes, I can see that. we generally had a book template that I would try to wrangle existing HTML into (taking into account the limitations of epub vs standard HTML/CSS), and from that POV Sigil is pretty good (tho with a pretty clunky interface).
Yeah, the interface really favours the build-your-own-tank types.
The key thing with Scrivener is working out the proper settings for compilation, and then it's largely fine (though I've never looked under the hood to see just _how_ fine its output is).
I think I've cracked this ebook malarky. I can use Scrivener to get all the images and words in the right order and do basic formatting. Then export to .docx, open in Pages so I can make the vocab tables pretty and export to epub with embedded fonts (which Scrivener won't do). Bit of a palaver.
My one bit of advice would be to use Epubcheck (either the official version from https://github.com/w3c/epubcheck or the validator in Sigil) to make sure that the epub is valid, otherwise even if it seems to work it’ll get rejected by stores. I do this as I go to make sure I’m not introducing errors.
Thanks! Will do! Though I'm only going to sell it direct to start with. I loathe Amazon with the heat of a thousand suns, so if I can avoid it, I shall.
I've done it! It was way more painful than it needed to be, but I have an ebook that looks fairly reasonable, flows properly, and is valid. Woot! Now to send to beta readers.
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The key thing with Scrivener is working out the proper settings for compilation, and then it's largely fine (though I've never looked under the hood to see just _how_ fine its output is).