How do I painlessly turn several hundred illustraions into an e-book (pdf)? Do you have such experience? Are there any tutorials? What resolution the images should be? Other important stuff I don't know?..

Please, give me some advice. I feel lost.

I dont know about 'painless', but I used InDesign... my ebooks were generated as a kind of byproduct for laying out my books for print. It is a fair bit of work to put that together, though, and if you dont have access to indesign and have never used it before the learning curve may be steep, especially if you're not planning on going to print yet (that's what it's most useful for IMO)

There are some other quick ways to do it though! One is to make sure all the files are sized appropriately and named in the right order and then run them through a PDF creator online; there are websites that can do this for you.

If you have Adobe Acrobat, it can also convert a big batch of files into a PDF just by selecting them in your computer files; it can downgrade their resolution, though, and I haven't figured out how to stop it from doing that, but effort-wise that's the easiest way I know of.

Unfortunately I can't give much advice on page dimensions because I just left InDesign choose for me in my export XD; 1000 pixels wide seems reasonable? But I'm sure others know more about it.

I've been doing this with But I'm A Cat Person -- you can get single-chapter PDFs on Comixology, and complete volumes on Gumroad.

A lot of the process involves batch processing in Photoshop, which is when you pick a folder and PS automatically applies the same series of steps to everything in the folder.

Photoshop can also automatically combine a series of image files into a PDF. It has trouble combining a series of small PDFs into a larger PDF -- for that I use a free program called PDFSam.

So the short version of the steps is this:

- Export the original artwork as a series of original-size PNG files (these are 2500x3300 px)

- Run those files through a Photoshop action that shrinks them and adds margins, creating a set of PSD files that are 6.25" by 9.25" at a 310dpi resolution (this is 1875x2775 px)

- Use Photoshop again to combine these PSDs into a PDF of the chapters

- Separately, make PDFs of bonus material for the beginning (title page, contents) and ending (character bios, variant covers, bonus art) of the book. (These I make in InDesign, but you could just as easily make each individual page in Photoshop, or your graphics program of choice)

- Combine the chapter PDF with the beginning and ending PDFs using PDFSam

Now, if you're making an ebook that's only going to be shared online and never going to print, you don't have to worry about the resolution or the margins. For BICP, the pages only display as 687x1017px on my computer (which, if you hold a ruler up to the screen, is 6.25" by 9.25"). Just make sure all your artbook pages are the same dimensions. That's what readers expect -- they'll think it's an error if they open the file and get pages that keep changing size.

Thank you both for the tips!

InDesign sounds like a really painful way, though, even if I had it.
I think I'll do my books in Photoshop then.

What I did before I got PagePlusx9 (which is between 20-25 bucks, does what inDesign does, just not as fancy, and also got a younger sibling Affinity Publisher, which is in free public beta as of today #notsponsored), I just got myself PDF24 and merged my pngs into a single pdf.

This program is usually frowned upon by professionals, but it did the trick for me, before I printed my comic and got a proper PDF out of it :P

I guess it's much easier to replace InDesign with something like Scribus (free software) that does the same.