For the past several months I’ve been looking into quite a few different ways to convert my interactive fiction into digital E-books for things like the Kindle. Some of the biggest issues I kept running into are outdated information and the lack of being able to talk with someone who has done what I’m looking to do.

Often in my research of something I’m trying to come up with some magical term that suddenly unlocks the gate and gives me the information I want. The terms you would think would result in a solution give old solutions that no longer seem to work. Blast the internet for holding everything past its expiration date.

Originally I started with Kindle Create. That seems like the most obvious choice, right? After a couple of failed attempts to get things done exactly the way I wanted it at a level of quality I wanted it. It became clear it was possible at some point but it no longer is or it never was.

My next stop was the Kindle Kid’s Book Creator. Children’s books are far more interactive than adult books most of the time. The best part was even if I used that tool I’m not forced to publish children’s books.

While Kindle Kid’s Book Creator did have more options. The route I took to try and get to where I wanted resulted in making the entire thing a PDF. Once the actual PDF was loaded in the letter quality and many other things were degraded and horrific.

Many old tutorials on using either of these two as a solution were quite old. It seemed like the ability to do what I wanted was just gutted entirely to make things more streamlined and basic. I was rather shocked by the lack of options Kindle Creator had let alone the kid's version. Both of these seemed to be rather basic and not anything I was looking to use let alone needed.

After a little more research, I ran into paid options. It was still quite questionable if what I wanted would even be possible after paying for software. It just felt like this was going to be the way it was. After all interactive fiction has its own “coding” languages and specific formats that work on certain sites only.

In the past, I even played around with one of those formats. Outside of putting that creation on a site like Itch.io. My other option would have been along go through an “official” process to get my work approved and published on a specific interactive fiction publishing site. My options seemed rather limited. I also did not meet the word minimum count to get approved on an “official” site for the code used in question.

The other issue with a lot of those things is they require royalties for sales of published content using their software on top of any other fees you are paying to publish. They also quite limited you to what you can even publish. I did not want to be limited. Even more so since converting a 70k piece of work line by line would take forever.

It also just did not feel like there was any chance of earning enough inside of those micro ecosystems to earn enough for all the added extra work. Not to mention some of them even have forced requirements in their terms of service that you will only publish using them for that particular book. No things!

So like anytime I feel like I hit a roadblock I take a break. I went and worked on other things. I have far too many other things going on anyway. I knew at some point however I’d return and try to find a solution.

After some time passed I started looking into things again. It turns out I grouped something wrongly into the thing it was yet another limited way to write an interactive fiction that would have its micro-ecosystem to publish into.

I should have put more effort into just trying to understand the best ways to go about creating an E-Book rather than just jumping off into the deep end of interactive fiction. I ended up overlooking what is called EPUB.

EPUBs simply means Electronic Publication. It turns out it is quite a widely used way to publish to e-book readers. Even the ones I was looking to publish on. On top of that, they support XHTML which I know for a fact if permitted could do exactly what I wanted in the first place.

This more or less meant I’d not even have to consider writing from scratch everything myself and hope the file format I saved it in would be an acceptable format for places I want to publish.

So I did a quick search into EPUB and the good news kept rolling it. While there is pay software out there for it. There are also open source royalty-free options as well. That last one is exactly what I was looking for.

I ended up settling on something called Sigil. The issue I ran into next however is a lot of the information and tutorials on how to use Sigil are quite outdated. At one point they switched up their viewer to something new called PageEdit which is also free.

Next, I had another large issue to overcome. Unlike trying to use Kindle Creators, Sigil is fully loaded with so many options I still don’t know what quite a few things even do. There are quite a few things you can do that are not even shown auto-loaded onto the toolbar either. It was quite overwhelming at first to look at.

The good news is I found exactly what I needed. It was also quite simple. The icons to do what I needed were even right next to each other. An anchor ID and a way to link to that idea.

It’s truly shocking the amount of effort it sometimes takes to find the simple solution you are looking for in life. How was this not a stand-out option in all the other things I looked into? I have no idea.

The other competent to make an interactive fiction work is simply a line like this. Far too many other things I looked into just wanted to provide the ability to create external links or lead the reader to an internal footer. I however wanted a separate page on top of going to an internal link.

Final Thoughts

Time tends to be the price you pay when you don’t have a circle of experts to reach out for something. While yes the internet is a beautiful thing and allows you to get around lacking understanding of things. It is also quite a dated place filled with lots of old and no longer working solutions.

It is also mind-blowing once you find the right words to ask the internet just how many options you have to choose from. There have to be at least 50 pieces of software that allow you to create EPUB files. Granted I would not be shocked if many did not support the exact feature I needed.

All of this leads me to wonder a bigger question. Is there a platform within the Hive ecosystem that supports users uploading EPUB file format? Originally when I published my interactive fiction though quite a few posts it always led to people telling me it’s no shock they did poorly That kind of way of going about it does not work well on Hive. This was no shock to me however interactive fiction is a bit tricky to publish overall.

I’m not sure if I’m going to go into further details of using Sigil. I mostly post gaming content so this is quite out of my usual wheelhouse of content. I however do enjoy updating people with other things I end up getting into.

Information

Written by @Enjar. Screenshots from Sigil software.