Geeking Out With Sigil And EPUB Creation, Part 4

Wow, I’m already on part 4! I suggest you start at the start if you are an adventurous indie author who thinks they might like to tackle formatting their own eBooks:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

(By the way, now I typically even write my blog posts using the HTML view. It’s not so scary once you get to know it!)

Last week, I finally got to create some nice drop caps, and I mentioned that I wanted to try to get some good block quotes in my books as well, since in the story, my main character gets letters from his father that he has to use to glean clues as to where his father might be headed next. And I had another reason for block quotes; in my upcoming, tricked-out, cleaned up, edited, super-duper version of The World of The Inventor’s Son, I needed a good system for citing my own books!

So, without further ado, let me show you the screen shots:

A screenshot of how I had to format an excerpt from Wattpad

As you can see, when originally published on Wattpad, they have next to no formatting options, so this is pretty much how it came out. I always worried it was confusing to readers.

Well, I’m not going to worry about possible confusion when I offer the EPUB version to my readers:

This is straight from Sigil, since I have not completed the project, and didn’t put it through Calibre yet.

Now, the nice big quotes, the narrower margins, and the italics, along with a classy citation at the end of it, all make it look like the nicer block quotes we’ve been getting used to seeing. By applying CSS rules to the “blockquote” and the “cite” tags, I was able to get a satisfactory result that I wouldn’t have been able to do with mere HTML.

When I use the block quote rules in The Inventor’s Son, I’m going to omit the quotation marks and the citation, but I might be able to apply a rule to the end signature when Ethan’s father actually signs the letters. As it turned out, I started formatting The World of The Inventor’s Son before finishing off the formatting of Book 1, and I’m glad I did that in a way, since now I figured out the block quote puzzle.

How it will translate to MOBI is still a mystery, but Amazon is rather keen on getting nicer formatting in their Kindle books, so I have faith it may turn out very well.

Until next week!

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