Self-ePublishing

This post serves as both a tutorial for publishing/editing your own ePub books using Notepad++ and Calibre as well as a portal for my first such publication: a revised copy of Project Gutenberg's Douay Rheims New Testament with a functional table of contents. Let us begin...

First, create or obtain a copy of your masterpiece in HTML format:

Next, open your file in Notepad++ and customize it making sure that each heading which you want in your Table of Contents is enclosed in h1 tags:

After saving, import the html file into Calibre using the 'Add books' button.

Calibre will automatically detect it as a 'zip' format book.

Highlight the imported 'zip' book, click the 'Convert books' button, and customize the book's title, cover, and other information as demonstrated below:

Skip down to the 'Table of Contents' screen in the left nav-bar, check 'Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents', and click the magic wand icon for the 'Level 1 TOC'. In the new window which appears, select 'h1' from the 'Match HTML tags with tag name' dropdown menu and click 'OK'. The result should look like this:

Skip to 'EPUB Output' in the left nav-bar and check 'Preserver cover aspect ratio'.

Click 'OK' and review the fruits of your labor.

That, in a nutshell, is how to create an ePub using Notepad++ and Calibre. Now you too can shake off the shackles of traditional, paper-based publication and begin your quest to become the next great author of our time! Or something like that...