QUESTION to writers and aspiring authors about tools for creating and formatting eBooks.

Hi Jean Vieira. That's cool that you're doing some creative writing. Good luck with this endeavor. I've been writing science fiction short stories for about eight years. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I recently co-edited an anthology of short fiction. Early in the project, my co-editor and I discussed our strengths and weaknesses so we could make wise decisions about our division of labor. I was new to self-publishing and totally blind. My co-editor had self-published an award-winning fiction series and was fully sighted. It made sense for my co-editor to take the lead on production.

That's not to say I didn't contribute during production. I helped review samples of cover art. I also performed copyedits on the PDF proofs. I even caught some mistakes our sighted reviewers missed. But most of my elbow grease went to other phases of the project.

If I were doing production on my own, I'd still work with someone sighted. I just don't trust the existing tools available.

On a tangential topic, I don't care for MS Word or Apple Pages primarily because they place so much emphasis on appearance, layout, and formatting. I find this distracts me when I'm trying to write and imagine. This is why I use Scrivener. It lets me focus primarily on content. The automatic format is good enough for sharing in a critique group or submitting to a publication market. And if I ever want to self-publish, I would export to Word for that.

I'd agree that outsourcing this is probably worth it. I use ulysses on mac and export to a template I've created however, I'd not be confident the layout was correct or that the copy was completely clean. The fact is, tooth combing documents for us is far more time consuming and shortcuts using templates can lead to unexpected results which we are unaware of. This is one of the great attractions of traditional publishing.

Using a template might be a good solution. Let us know how it works.

Many of the people I've worked with use InDesign templates, and this allows them to quickly take a Word file as input and crank out both ePub and PDF. I haven't tried InDesign, nor have I looked at the price, but I imagine it is both inaccessible and expensive.

I really would love to suggest scrivner. It does a lot of what you're wanting. On the iPhone and iPad it's very accessible. Not sure about the Mac. On Windows however, the accessibility is dismal. I'm an avid writer myself. While I do use MS word to format all my documents, I do have at least some sight. Even without sight though, you can do some rudimentary formatting, indentations, paragraph layouts, chapter and subchatper headings. NVDA will tell you formatting, and so will JAWS. It is doable, but if you were planning to self-publish I too would probably have someone look over your formatting, just to b e absolutely sure.

I always write fiction, screenplays, radio drama scripts, and nonfiction articles in plain text and then convert later. This blog post explains how I convert everything from plain text into Shun's proper manuscript format. I also provide templates as well so you don't have to do all the work, but when you get the hang of Pandoc templates, even for Macs, you can make multiple templates for all different kinds of writing and then convert later after writing. For editing, I outsource all editing to some third parties in this post