Hi everyone.
I'm a newbie and starting to feel lost.
Ultimately my main question is how to make a publish-worthy ebook (pdf? epub? mobi?) out of a Word document.
I'm usually pretty good at doing what I don't know how to do. So when a friend asked me to make an ebook out of his 250 page microsoft word document that he could sell online, I thought it couldn't be that hard. Now I'm thinking I was naieve.
I have the new Microsoft Word 2013 Preview installed and used its new feature to save the .docx as a .pdf. It's nothing fancy. It's 99.5% text, a large graphic on the coverpage, and maybe one or two small graphics at various places. I wasn't aiming for it being a perfect work of art. I just wanted to make sure it was decently formatted and readable.
I *assume* (please correct me if I'm wrong) that the PDF file could be read by most ereaders. I just downloaded the InDesign trial thinking that I could open the PDF in InDesign (wrong) and from there make a few adjustments, resave it as a pdf, and also save it in ePUB and .mobi formats. It's obviously not so simple. To my surprise, InDesign can't even open the pdf file. ("Cannot open the file... may not support the file format, a plug-in that supports the file format may be missing..." or "Please convert ...... to an InDesign document before adding it to a book file.")
I'll try to look at some of the tutorials mentioned in these forums. Obviously I haven't done my homework dilligently yet. But in the meantime, if someone could shed some light on all this for me that'd be tremendously appreciated.
Thanks for any tips!
Chris