Zinepal, what a name. So what is it?
Zinepal is a service that allows you to take info from blogs, website feeds, or a few Google services and produce unique ebooks or eZines in a variety of formats. You can then make the documents open to anyone, email them, or download them for your own use. The service is free for five articles in a eZine, or you can take out a subscription to create larger documents or create.
There are three steps to compiling an eZine:
- select information that Zinepal can import,
- tweak your eZine appearance,
- create!
The initial step is really the most difficult, but the good news is that with this ebook creation software, you can save your choices 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 post titles and a short summary of what can be imported. You can duplicate 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 looks good to you, name 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 graphical 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 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 preview option that allows you to make changes if something does not look right.
Then comes the fun part- publishing! Click the “Create My Zine” button and you’re through! Zinepal cogitates for a few seconds to a couple of minutes and then lets you know when your eBooks are ready. You can then download your publications 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 webmaster(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.
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