Post-finishing #2: Sigil

In Post-Finishing #1, I mentioned that I used Sigil to take the finished manuscript from Scrivener and turn it into a good looking, functional e-book. Here’s what I did.

Post-finishing #1

This isn’t about querying, or running ad campaigns, or that sort of thing. This is about the nuts-and-bolts part of finishing a book, and finishing the finishing. The bent here is on self-publishing.

Workflow

I wrote my novel in Scrivener 1.9.7 for Windows. After experimenting with exporting directly to .mobi using Scrivener’s compile feature, I concluded it is not up to the task. The resulting file was readable, but it just didn’t look good. I’ll check out the compile feature in version 3, whenever that comes out.

I tried exporting to a Word doc, then doing the formatting there, but Word adds too much extra junk, and the formatting was frustratingly inconsistent.

I tried exporting as an epub file and then doing the layout in Sigil, and that is what worked for me. There is a learning curve, but I was already familiar with the basics of html, so it wasn’t too bad. The good part is the control Sigil affords, as long as you are comfortable editing the html directly. I did have to learn some css, because that was something I’d never messed with before.

I initially wanted a drop cap at the start of each chapter, but I just couldn’t get it to look consistently good. I could get it looking solid on one device, but it looked bad on another. Too close, too far away, or it would mess with the line spacing in ugly ways no matter what settings I used. Googling around, I found other writers commenting on similar difficulties with drop caps in e-books, so I ultimately moved away from that idea. I would still like to do it, but I need more precise control over how it looks. Perhaps for the print version.