How to Use Hubpages Hubs as Material to Fill Your eBooks

Hubpages can form a solid foundation for you in your development of effective eBooks.

You can use it as a place in which to exercise your writing muscles and to test the results of your efforts. Hubpages provides you with a sophisticated audience of readers who are also writers. You would have to pay a fortune out of your own pocket to obtain commentary (or the lack of commentary) from a group such as this. You write. They read. They tell you what they think of what you wrote. Define the word, "outstanding," and you will know what a resource such as this is really worth to you.

Most eBooks are written with sales in mind. Some are destined for use as giveaways, perhaps aimed at friends, often to be distributed to customers or to intended customers. It used to be that eBooks went onto compact discs (CDs) that could hold 700 megabytes of information, more or less. Along came digital video devices (DVDs) that upped the content capacity to something on the order of 4.7 gigabytes (4,700 megabytes, or almost 7 times as much as a typical CD can hold).

Consider the data content (in bytes of information) in an ordinary text-filled book, 312 pages in length with each page (in PDF format) being sized as 5.25 x 8.26 inches. The entire book contained 1.46 megabytes, or approximately 1,540,000 bytes. I will let you mathematicians do the arithmetic, but my calculator tells me that I can fit a whole lot of books of this type onto a 700 megabyte capacity CD and 7 times as many onto a capable DVD. By the way, the 312 page book was a real example available for downloading at 1.46 megabytes. Of course, images will add greatly to the byte-load, but there is enough room on a CD or DVD for plenty of images, too.

… and the cost of an ordinary blank CD? The last CDs that I purchased cost me a dime each.

We have thus established that you will save lots of time and money having your writings scrutinized and commented upon by your peers - other writers. You already understand that, when it comes to self-publishing your writings, you can spend lots of money having a conventionally printed and bound paper-page book produced for your distribution, or you can plan to put your words onto the "pages" of an eBook for pennies.

There are some other cost comparisons you may choose to make, such as shipping costs, advertising matters, storage problems. Bound paper-page books take up lots of space whereas your eBook can happily sit within a folder on your computer hard disk to be "printed" whenever you want to make another eBook. (There goes another dime!)

As for advertising, you can do that using one or more free Internet blogs, sample chapters in welcoming eZines, and so on. You can offer your eBooks through brokers such as "Click Bank," sell them on eBay, and in many other ways. Telling your friends and prospective customers by eMail is one of those other ways.

When you write your Hubpages article (or whole book chopped up into chapters, one or part of one chapter per "Hub") you should do your writing onto your own computer storage device using a word processor or even a plain text editor. Cut-and-paste your writing into Hubpages already nicely formatted the way you want it to be in your forthcoming eBook.

I keep my word processing files separate from my image files to make it easier for me to find what I need when I need it, and also because I know that I will have to use texts and images differently later on when I put the eBooks together.

Off goes the "Hub." Back comes criticism (hopefully). I tweak the original article, part of a chapter, a whole chapter, and any photo or artwork image that needs tweaking. Ordinarily I will use that editing to upgrade the existing "Hub," and always I will make corrections to my text and image files stored here, too. The raw material for the eBook is building right along.

Everything is now done with. The eBook text has been reviewed on Hubpages by writers who know how to read things, consider what they read, and then comment on them. The images all seem to work nicely to accompany and to augment the text.

Now is the time that I format my eBook.

The page size is chosen. Usually I stick to a page size that will conveniently fit on an ordinary computer screen. If I believe that the intended reader will also want to make a printout of the eBook, I choose a regular paper-page size, usually 8-1/2 by 11 inches. Things like page margins, page "headers," page numbering, number of columns on a page, "footers," chapter numbering and headings, bibliographic handling, tables of content, and something you can do very nicely with eBooks – internal and external linkings, are also considered and taken care of in this next step:

I put the text and the images into a program that I use, "Serif Page Plus." I carefully edit the pages, correcting anything on them that needs correcting. Often that takes a lot of time and effort, but it has to be done (as we all know and understand).

If everything looks OK, I tell the program to make my eBook for me. It does.

Then I save the resulting eBook, all of it, onto one or more storage devices on my computer.

To make sure that my eBook is ready to roll, I "burn" a copy of the eBook onto both a CD and a DVD. There are a number of good "burning" programs available in this computerized world of ours. I prefer one that you can download for free – "cdrtools/Mode2CDMaker/VCDImager Frontend" that is available as an "open source" program. I downloaded my copy from "SourceForge" which you can reach on their Web site on the Internet. There are many others as well.

View your CD and your DVD to make sure that they are error-free and as you want them to appear. If not, make corrections as necessary and store your corrected eBook back where it was earlier, ready for duplication again.

I am sure that there are other programs with which you can convert your texts and images into CD/DVD form. I have not personally used any other than the one I bought from Serif for a very reasonable price. Surely, the Adobe people offer one, but I do not know its cost. The "Adobe Reader" program that folks use to read the eBook (PDF) files is freely available, with even the frequent updates being forwarded to you at no cost, but I am not up on the information concerning their eBook preparation software.

So, there you have it. How to use Hubpages to help you put your eBooks together. Have fun. Make a ton of money. If you like, you can send some of that here.