Ebook Creation the Easy Way – For Free – with Zinepal!
Zinepal – funny name, great results!
Zinepal is a service that allows you to take data from blogs, website feeds, or a few Google services and create unique ebooks or eZines in a variety of formats. You can then make the documents open to anyone, email them, or download them for adding to a website. The service is free for five articles in a publication, or you can take out a subscription to create bigger documents or create.
There are three steps to putting together an eBook:
- select content that Zinepal can import,
- tweak your eZine appearance,
- publish!
The first step is really the most involved, but the good news is that with this ebook creation process, you can save your work and come back to it to work on it another time. Find an RSS feed link or a web page, and enter the link into Zinepal. The website will then scan the site and display article titles and a short summary of what can be imported. You can repeat this process as many times as you want and pull data from any site to which you have access. The articles you select are displayed in a pulldown box on the front page of the site where you are entering web addresses. Once you are pleased with the amount of material you have, you go to the next step.
Editing the eZine is an easy process. You can reorder the articles into a sequence that makes sense to you, name the eZine and add a short description which will show up at the head of the first column, add keywords to make the eZine more easily found, and add a pictorial logo to it. Zinepal even allows you to add advertising and provides editable images so you can fit ads in the article in a way that does not foul up the formatting. You can tweak the articles one by one and change text font, add links, and add editorial comments. There is even a prevue option that allows you to make changes if something does not look right.
Then comes the final step- publishing! Click the “Create My Zine” button and you’re done! Zinepal cogitates for a few seconds to a couple of minutes and then tells you when your eBooks are ready. You can then download your documents in PDF, Kindle, Mobipocket, or ePub format! You can save the eZine on Zinepal.com and make it public or make it private for your use later on. Since the eZine can also include links to your site, it will give you an SEO boost as well.
The programmer(yes, it’s a one-man show) deserves a big pat on the back for this as it’s a super service! I can’t recommend it enough.