The Truth About Zinepal – A Review of an eBook Creation Software

Zinepal, what a name. So what is it?

Zinepal is a service that allows you to take information from blogs, website feeds, or a few Google services and produce one of a kind ebooks or eZines in a variety of formats. You can then make the documents visible to anyone, email them, or download them for adding to a website. The service is free for five articles in a eBook, or you can take out a subscription to create bigger documents or create.

There are three steps to developing an eZine:

1. identify information that Zinepal can import,
2. hone your eZine appearance,
3. publish!

The initial step is really the most difficult, but the good news is that with this ebook creation process, you can save your document and return to it to work on it later. 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 duplicate this selection as many times as you want and pull information from any site to which you have access. The articles you select are displayed in a drop down box on the first page of the site where you are entering web addresses. Once you are satisfied with the amount of material you have, you go to the next step.

Editing the eZine is a straightforward process. You can reorder the articles into a sequence that looks good to you, title the eZine and add a short description which will appear 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 custom templates so you can fit ads in the article in a way that does not screw 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 stuff you’ll really love- publishing! Click the “Create My Zine” button and you’re done! Zinepal chugs away for a few seconds to a couple of minutes and then lets you know 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.