Aug 29 2018, 1:23 pm
Re: Making ebooks - advice needed
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.