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See also:
How can I copy or import styles from another project?
How can I have multiple tables of contents and a master table of contents?
How do I combine several projects into one project?
Sometimes you may wish to create a book comprising a number of existing books: a box set (or anthology or compendium). Here are some tips about how to do it. This is for guidance only; you may have a completely different method that is equally valid (for example, merging all DOCX files into one before importing).
First, create a new, empty project for the box set using New Project.
You can import the configurations and style sheets from one of the books to be imported, using File | Import | Import from Project. In the dialog that shows, choose a project to import from, then click Options, clear all checkboxes, and check just Configurations and Style Sheets. Press OK to close the options dialog, and then OK again to import the information.
With luck, you will have used similar styles in all of your books, so that when you import the books, you will not have to do too much style replacement. So when importing style sheets, choose a book that has styles you're most likely to want to apply across the whole box set. Similarly, import those configurations that you will want to use for the box set, to cut down on adding and editing configurations later.
Create a new book section document that represents the title page (and/or cover) of each book in the set. It can be blank for now - you'll copy information into it after importing the content. Enter the title of each book for the name of each document.
Now open all the books you want to include in your box set. If you don't normally open multiple projects simultaneously, click Options on the toolbar and in the Projects page, check View multiple projects. You can now open all the books without closing your box set project.
For each book, select the book document you created in (3), and then use the command Documents | Copy Documents. In the dialog that shows, check the relevant book, which will check all the documents in it. Also check Create as children at the bottom of the dialog - this is important!
Press OK, and all the documents will be copied under the book document, making it much easier to manage the box set than if all the documents are created at the top level. Do this for each book.
Now you can do some editing, such as:
Copy the contents of each imported title page into each overall book document, and delete the now-redundant title page.
Insert a cover image into each overall book document, setting the height to 100% and putting a page break after it (to make separate cover and title pages).
Insert a bookmark before the cover using an abbreviated title of the book, to be used later when we create the table of contents. You can use Format | Insert | Links | Bookmark or Shift+Ctrl+K for this.
Copy one of the title pages into a new Title Page document for the whole box set, as a template for the new text, and edit it as required. You can set the "title-page" guide type for this overall title page if you want, in the document properties.
Make sure that only one document (if any) has the "text" guide type, indicating the start of the overall book text. When you compile the book, Jutoh will warn you if you have duplicate guide types.
If you have 'also by this author' pages, move one set to the end of the book (drop it on the top-level folder icon in the outline) and delete any duplicates from the other books.
Add a preface for the box set if you wish, and any other 'extra' material. Amazon recommends that you place extra material at the end of the book.
Note that you can move a document to another document's children by dragging it to the parent document with the shift key held down. Move a document to the end of the project by dropping it on the Content item; move a document in front of another one by dropping it on another document. You can also use the copy and paste commands on the outline context menu (invoked with right click, or Cmd+click on Mac).
Compile the book to see if there are any errors, such as missing styles.
Missing named styles without '+' in the name can be fixed either by adding the style to the style sheet, or by applying a different style using the Formatting Palette. Missing automatic styles with '+' in the name can be corrected by resetting the formatting with Format | Clear Direct Formatting (Shift+Ctrl+R) and then applying the required style again. You can also use Find and Replace to replace styles en masse.
Even if there are no errors, you should check that formatting is consistently applied throughout.
This is optional, but it is best to have a table of contents or the ereader Contents button (for example on Kindles) will be greyed out, which will make the book look broken. By default, Jutoh will create a simple TOC anyway (or you may already have one that you created manually), but for more control you can use Format | Book | Build Table of Contents.
Let's say that you wish to have your preface, book title pages, extras, and so on as level 1 headings in your TOC page. You want individual chapters to be at level 2. But your chapter headings may be using the "Heading 1" style or similar since they are at the top level in individual books, so what to do? One method is to create a "Heading 0" style. Set the outline level of this heading to 1, and edit the other heading styles to bump the outline level up by one, so "Heading 1" has an outline level of 2, "Heading 2" has an outline level of 3, and so on.
Now use "Heading 0" for your top-level sections such as preface and 'Also by this author'. The title page for each book doesn't need any heading style, since Jutoh will simply add the name of the document at the top-level if it doesn't find a suitable heading style within the document.
Use Format | Book | Build Table of Contents and change the options such that for TOC level 1, Jutoh finds "Heading 0", and for TOC level 2, Jutoh finds "Heading 1", and so on.
You might also edit the style "TOC Entry 1" and add space before and after (say, 40 tenths of a mm for each) in order to emphasize the top-level items in the TOC.
This will create a hierarchical table of contents page. If you only want the top-level documents to show, set the maximum depth to 1 in the table of contents wizard.
Note that some ereaders only show the top-level documents in the navigation panel; but the table of contents page will show the full hierarchy.
If you want a separate table of contents for each book, to be automatically compiled by Jutoh, please follow the instructions in How can I have multiple tables of contents and a master table of contents?.
Finally, you need to add an eye-catching cover for the box set. A popular style is to show a collection of books in 3D. There are commercial programs for doing this (search for "3D box cover") and also some free methods, as this tutorial illustrates using the open source image-editing software GIMP:
http://www.indiesunlimited.com/2015/02/19/making-an-ebook-box-set-cover-in-gimp/
Alternatively, if you have software such as Adobe Photoshop, you can use two distorted images to achieve a similar result.
When you have an image in JPEG, TIFF or PNG form, you can import it into Jutoh by clicking on the cover thumbnail or showing the Cover page of the Project Properties dialog, and clicking on Create From Image File.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0201: Why is my fixed layout book jumbled when uploaded to a Kobo eInk device? | Next: KB0203: Why do I get formatting problems on Kindle for iOS?