Introduction
Create a new bookflow
Steps
Metadata

A Bookflow is the conversion of a single manuscript—from uploading it to the Bookalope server to downloading its converted files. So, when you’re on your home page simply click on the name of any book—whether it’s on a bookshelf or not—to navigate to that book’s overview of Bookflows:

Your book’s Bookflows are listed on the Book page here. From left to right, in each row you have the Bookflow’s name (e.g. “Bookflow 1”) and next to it are the dates that show when the Bookflow was originally created and when it was last updated.

The Step column shows you which conversion step the Bookflow is currently in, and the Plan column shows the payment plan you’ve assigned to that conversion. If you haven’t purchased and assigned a plan to this Bookflow yet, or if you haven’t set up your payment information, then don’t worry: Bookalope will guide you through the appropriate action here. Just click on the icon you see in that column and follow the link.

You will notice a number of other “action icons” at the right side of a Bookflow row that allow you to work with a specific Bookflow:

• You can Duplicate a Bookflow and all of its associated data;
• You can also Edit a Bookflow’s metadata and modify it specifically for this conversion;
• You might decide to Restart a Bookflow from scratch; i.e. begin to import and analyze the uploaded manuscript again as if you had just uploaded it; and
• You can Delete a Bookflow and all of its associated files if you no longer need it.

Finally, you can follow the Back to My Books link to return to the main page.

If your book goes through multiple rounds of editing, you might end up with multiple manuscripts for that same book. So if you’d like to convert a newer version of the book’s manuscript then you can create a new Bookflow by clicking the Create new Bookflow button:

Enter a descriptive name for the bookflow and click the Create Bookflow and Continue button, or follow the Back to all Bookflows link to return back to the book’s overview page.

When Bookalope works through a document, it goes through a series of steps to analyze, clean up, and transform the information it extracted from the original uploaded document. See also our How Bookalope works section.

And so, the web application guides you through some of these steps so you can make adjustments and add information to your conversion:

1. Upload: On this page you select the file that you’d like to convert, and you upload it to the Bookalope server. Once the server has received your file, Bookalope extracts the content and a lot of additional information that it needs to derive and classify the structure of your book.
2. Review: On this page you can review the structure of your book, make adjustments if necessary, and add more information that further improves the quality of your exported file. You can also edit and fix issues that Bookalope may have found in your book.
3. Convert: On this page you select the file format you’d like to download, select a visual style and tweak a few more features of your final book, and then convert and download your finished book.

Click on any of the steps in the list to learn more!

In addition to managing a book’s metadata you can edit the metadata for every bookflow individually. This enables you to fine-tune the information that you’d like to expose to distribution platforms in great detail.

On the book’s overview page, simply click the Edit action icon:

which takes you straight to the Edit Metadata page for this bookflow. There are four different sections with heaps of different fields on the Metadata page, so let’s go through each section one by one.

Cover image. In this section you manage your book’s cover image. For more details please take a look at our Book cover image recipe.

Metadata. This section contains the central information about your book: its title, author, languages used in your book, and so forth. If you’ve uploaded an ONIX3 file you will find that the information has already been filled in from the uploaded file. Note the Language dropdown where you select the primary language of your book; in addition to that primary language, your book’s text may contain other languages and you can select them with the list in the Other languages box. These other languages are important if you’d like to classify the content of your book by the languages used, see the Managing multiple languages recipe or the Content page for more details. If you’d like us to add more languages, contact us.

Accessibility information. This section contains additional metadata that’s only useful for accessible ebooks. If your book is structured well and you supply appropriate alternative text for your images, then Bookalope is able to produce an accessible ebook. However, in some cases you might like to customize the default metadata. That’s what you can do here.

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters. If your ebook contains links to external websites, for example your company’s homepage or social media pages, then Bookalope allows you to track readers’ clicks on those links using standard UTM parameters that integrate seamlessly with your existing marketing campaign tracking. While the Source parameter is always set to “ebook,” you can fill in the Medium and Campaign parameters that identify the ebook from which a user navigates to the external website. Please note that this is a feature available only to Enterprise Plans.

When you’re done and have filled in all the fields, click the Update Bookflow button to commit your changes to the server, or follow the Back to all Bookflows link to abort them.