HTML, Word documents, and most other ways that indie authors have to format their ebooks all have the same common flaw: rework. If you sell multiple books on multiple platforms, you can quickly find yourself buried in files. That’s because if you want to follow best practices, your back matter should have platform-specific links. For example, if you buy Orconomics on Amazon, all of the links in the back of the book should take you to Amazon books. Retailers and readers alike prefer this approach. However, if you have three books available on five platforms, you need fifteen separate HTML files. That’s painful. Every time you want to edit your author bio, add a book to the back matter, or update your newsletter invitation, you have to open, update, and save 15 different files.
Case in point, a while ago I wanted to add the new logo for Gnomish Press to the front of all of my ebooks. It’s a simple change, but it can still take 10 minutes to open fifteen different files, paste a line of code in the right spot, and save them out. So instead, I opened one file, made the change once, and automatically updated fifteen different files in just under twenty seconds.
It was easy. It used good, old-fashioned HTML. And it didn’t require expensive software. Want to see how it’s done? Read on.