Professional Ebook Publishing with Shaxpir 2.2

It’s springtime in Portland, and the warm sunny weather has put a huge smile on my face. Or maybe I’m just excited to share the news with you of our latest release!

Today, I’m delighted to announce Shaxpir 2.2.0, which adds support for a bunch of great new features devoted to ebook publishing. After pouring your heart into your characters and plot and prose, it’s so gratifying to finally share your story with the world, and now Shaxpir provides the tools you need to do so. This is one of our most exciting releases yet, and I’m sure you’re going to love it.

First and foremost, with this release, Shaxpir includes a new EPUB export format, so that you can directly create ebooks for professional distribution. EPUB is the industry-standard format accepted by Amazon (footnote: 1), Apple, Google, and Barnes & Noble, for all their ebook stores.

To generate an EPUB for one of your story projects, just go to the EXPORT panel, and choose EPUB as your export format. Then configure the other export options (e.g., whether to include your notebook or manuscript, whether to generate a table-of-contents, etc), and click on the SAVE button.

The export panel also includes another new option: Include Synopsis, which lets you include a few paragraphs of description text directly in your EPUB metadata. Some retailers use this text to display a summary of your ebook in their store, and many ebook readers show you the synopsis when you browse through the content library on your device.

To support this feature, Shaxpir now includes a SYNOPSIS in every story project, where you can create the text that goes into that ebook summary.

Finally, of course, your ebook wouldn’t be complete without a beautiful cover.

Shaxpir now supports adding cover art to your story projects, and it embeds that cover art within your exported EPUB file. Just go to the story OVERVIEW panel, and click on the camera icon to select a cover image from your hard drive. Most ebook retailers have guidelines (footnote: 2) for the dimensions and format of your cover image, so be sure to double-check that your cover art conforms with those expectation.

With this release, Shaxpir is now the fastest and easiest way to publish a professional-quality ebook, from start to finish. Visit the download page to install Shaxpir 2.2.0 today. We can’t wait to see what you’ll create!

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(Footnote 1) Amazon has its own proprietary ebook format, called KF8, but their support for EPUB is excellent. You can upload an EPUB file directly to your Kindle Direct Publishing account, and Amazon will automatically convert it to KF8 for you.

They also provide tools like the Kindle Previewer and KindleGen, which you can use if you’d rather create those KF8 files yourself. Unfortunately, Amazon’s licensing terms prevent us from ditributing those tools directly within Shaxpir.

(Footnote 2) For example, Amazon’s cover art guidelines require using either a JPEG or TIFF file (no PNG images allowed!) and suggest an aspect ratio of 1.6, with at least 2500 pixels on the longest side. Other retailers may have different requirements, so be sure to do your research.