“How to make an eBook using Mobipocket Creator and OpenOffice.org writer, Part 1”

Hi there, my name is Rosemary and I write books. For the longest time I didn't know how to make my own eBook and now with a little “trial and error" I've managed to learn to create my own interactive eBooks. I haven’t the money to purchase Microsoft word so I use the free OpenOffice.org writer. Here is my tutorial to show you how to do it.

Step 1: Write your book, this is an important one. You have to proof it and line edit before you convert your .doc file into a .html. Do not number your pages because eBooks don’t require it, especially on kindle.

Step 2: Use Heading styles for your chapters and title. You can do this by going to “Formatting” then scrolling down to “Style and Formatting”. A small window will appear and the list of headings will be shown. From here you can pick “Heading 1-Heading 10“. For all intensive purposes, let’s just put Heading 1 for the title of the book and Heading 2 for the introduction and chapter titles. You can modify the style of each Heading by simply right clicking modify in the Style and Formatting window.

Step 3: Once you have the chapters and title properly formatted, then proceed to pick out an empty space before your chapter and/or introduction. Go to “insert”. Scroll down to “indexes and tables” then go across to “indexes and tables” and click on it. Choose “Table of Contents” and go to the bar near “Index/Table” and check out “Entries”. (Note. For any eBook you want there to be hyper-links for each chapter so the option of having a table of contents is crucial in creating a successful eBook.)

Step 4: Now that you’re in the “Entries” section of the window box, mouse over the little letter boxes near the word “structure” above the button “chapter no.” Mouse over the buttons to reveal what they are for. It should be “Chapter #”, “Entry”, “Tab Stop”, and “Page #”. You do not want “Page #” , instead you want “Hyperlink”. Click on the “#” button and click on the “Hyperlink” button below. Now the "#” button should be replaced with the “LS”. Next, click on the empty space before “E#” and click “Hyperlink” button again. An “LE” button should appear before the “E#”. Repeat this step for “level” 2 by going to the left side where “structure” is and clicking 2 beneath the “level”. If you used more headings repeat for each additional heading style you used. (ie. level 3, level 4)

Step 5: Go back to “Index/Table” bar and move to “Evaluate up to” level section. Put it to 2 or whichever Heading you stopped at. If you stopped at Heading 3, then put it to 3. Click okay.

Step 6: Right, so now you have a Hyper-linked table of contents. You need to put bookmarks in order for Mobi creator to know where the table of contents are and where the start of your chapters is. So simply go to the start of your table of contents and click a space right before. Go to “insert” and scroll down to “bookmark”. Then input “toc” hit okay. Go to the start of your chapter 1 and click the space right before it. Go back to “insert”, then scroll down to “bookmark”, select and type in “start”. There you go, now save as a .html file.

For part 2 click here.

Article by: Rosemary Jasmine Rivera