I swear I put this on my calendar

Tribulations fell out of Prime exclusivity earlier this month, and it took me a week to realize it! Whoops!

Anyway, I’m putting it onto Smashwords now. That’s become a little different. If you don’t know, Smashwords typically wants you to upload a DOC file, which they will convert into all formats—BUT if you’re compulsive like me, you can upload the EPUB file separately, just so you feel like it’s OK.

I’ve always done that, making the EPUB file in Calibre without any problems. But now (and this wasn’t a problem a few months ago), they won’t take the Calibre-generated EPUB files—they claim there are a massive slew of problems.

I guess somebody upgraded somewhere? I have no idea, and this is well beyond my technical abilities. So I’m ditching Calibre and just uploading a DOC into Smashwords—fingers crossed that the EPUBs they generate are decent!

ETA: Smashwords e-book here!

And it's out! (and free!)

Whoo! The third book in the Trang series is finally OUT! Just on Amazon as an e-book for now, but yo, it’s FREE for the next five days! Get yourself a copy!

(Seeing it in really small thumbnails on Amazon…I think I’m gonna noodle with the cover a little more.)

ETA: Did that, and I also fiddled with the Trang series books in Kindle Create—I don’ t know if these are new features or if I just missed them before, but there’s now some decent presentation for your other books in the back matter, so I’m upgrading those.

I’m also re-uploading A Dislocated World minus the drop caps at the beginnings of the chapter. This is SUCH a case of Amazon’s 90/10 issue, but drop caps never rendered properly in the “Look Inside!” feature, even though I just used the regular settings in Amazons’s own software. Of course having it look like it was made wrong is just the worst thing with nonfiction, because you’re trying to present yourself as some kind of authority & not an idiot nut job. I made various attempts to get this fixed, but no—they couldn’t do a thing, they were so very, very sorry. So the drop caps will be gone, and hopefully the “Look Inside!’ feature won’t find something else that was done right to totally fuck up. (EATA: It did exactly that. JFC.)

Whoot-whoot!

I have submitted the e-book! Shouldn’t be long now!!

I think I’m going to fiddle a little with the old Amazon e-books at some point, because you can link people to your other titles now.

Done!

I’ve uploaded Dislocated World to Smashwords, yay. They act like you should convert it to .doc instead of .epub, but dear God I am not going through that again….

ETA: At least not right away. I’ll get to it eventually.

Let me convert you!

Since I’m getting ready to put Dislocated World on Smashwords, I needed to convert it into an ePub file. I know in the back of my mind that at some point I was planning on figuring out some new, fancier way to do this, but I’m not up to making the effort today, so I used Calibre.

Wow. The book didn’t have the MASSIVE formatting problems that happened when I converted it into a DOC file, but there was a lot of random underlining, mostly in specific sections of the book, plus some random strike-thrus. I have no idea how to edit an ePub file, so I had to go back and forth editing in LibreOffice—which at least did work.

The thing is, I could not figure out some searchable formatting mark causing the issue—it wasn’t the “underline” mark, that’s for sure. So it would look like this in LibreOffice (note that the paragraph marks are visible, and there’s nothing weird):

And like this in ePub:

And no clue as to why. Sometimes it did seem like there was an invisible character in there, but other times it didn’t.

The above, which you would think would cause difficulties? No problem whatsoever.

Anyway, I was able to fix it by deleting the paragraph marks and everything around them, and then replacing them. Who knows why this happened, or why that worked? LibreOffice still beats the shit out of Word, but the conversion issues are definitely an irritating phenomenon.

Ugh, I'm a hot mess

I had family visit for the first time in a year-and-a-half, which was wonderful, but then of course I get a sinus infection and now have to wait for the results of a COVID test. I will be VERY surprised if the test is positive (get vaccinated!), but obviously it’s better to be safe than sorry, especially because I have to think about my mom. The visiting family is all testing, too, just because of time spent traveling and being around so many people.

(Just to PSA for a moment: In my extended family, four people got COVID pre-vaccine, and one of them died from it. At least sixteen have been vaccinated with no deaths or serious illness.)

Obviously I haven’t been too focused on book stuff. Today I started to look over the copy edits of Tribulations, but I quickly decided that (although I am feeling better) I was still a bit too sick to deal with it.

Instead I went on Amazon to double-check that A Dislocated World was leaving KDP Select. (I need to prep the e-book for Smashwords, but that’s also not going to happen today.) It was supposed to do that three months ago, but apparently re-enrollment is automatic, and they don’t bother to alert you or anything, so I missed it.

The book is supposed to leave KDP Select on the 19th, but then I realized that, since I hadn’t expected the book to re-enroll, I hadn’t thought to use the free days from the second enrollment! So I’m going to do the lazy & bad thing and just make it free without any marketing from the 16th to the 19th. Go get it if you want it!

Progress report

I finished inputting the corrections, and then got ready to put the book onto Kindle.

To do that, I needed to convert the file into a .doc file. And guess what? Yes, the formatting got completely fucked up—everything was bold, italic, underlined AND double-struckthrough (which was not even something I knew was possible to do!).

Much untangling later, it’s in Kindle Create, and I think it’s probably OK, but obviously I’m going to go over it much more carefully before I upload it.

Tomorrow…..

Chugging along

I re-read Trang and Trials, make notes of any details that might require bit of an adjustment to Tribulations, and now I’m going through that and inputting changes. There aren’t a lot, but layouts are just so fiddly (plus of course I have to change the manuscript, otherwise the e-book will be wrong) that it’s fairly slow going. Still, it’s happening, and I’ve found a couple of mistakes—I always feel you should get stuff as clean as possible before you pay someone to copy edit it, so that’s good.

Yup

Via Lindsay Buroker, here's an interesting run-through of what is going on in the science fiction & fantasy field, with a special emphasis on what's NOT getting measured via traditional industry measures.

X-ray vision!

The family busyness is still happening and will continue to require some attention, but I also took some time to put together those Amazon Kindle "X Rays." I'd never bothered before, but honestly, I have trouble remembering who everyone in the Trang series is, and then The Weirld is supposed to be accessible to younger readers, who of course need a little help knowing who Gracie Allen is. So I went through and did that. It's a little tedious but also kind of funny--I have to be careful to explain who someone is without giving away spoilers!

Oh my God, Smashwords

OK, Smashwords is officially driving me crazy. It was the easier one to use back when I was doing the Trang books, but it does NOT play well with illustrations, boy howdy. I'm realizing that I'm going to have to upload one version to be converted into everything, and then upload a special .epub version so that the .epub isn't completely fucked. Uuuuuugggghh......

ETA: OK, at this point The Weirld is on Smashwords itself, and seems fairly decent (like, it's readable, although not necessarily beautiful) in all formats. However, I don't know if I'll be able to set it up so that it can be offered at other retailers through Smashwords. Do I care? Should I just upload it directly? At the moment, I think this is one of those problems I'm going to kick down the road, because I'd rather focus on Trials.

Progress report

The Weirld is out of KDP Select today, so I got it ready to go to Smashwords. That's a process that hasn't changed much, but is still a bit fiddly. Once again file conversions led to problems with italics--I fixed those, but then when I went to look at my Kindle version to make sure the problems weren't there, I realized that the Table of Contents has vanished. Ugh.

ETA: Ooh! I published it on Smashwords, took one look, and immediately unpublished it--the pictures are not working. OK, I think I'm going to put off working on that until tomorrow....

Industry counts--still unreliable

I'm taking a couple of days off from book stuff--I was ignoring other things, plus I'm feeling a need for a break.

Buuuut...via Lindsay Buroker, Forbes did an article about how opaque the e-book market is (citing a post from The New Publishing Standard). It's been a while since I've paid attention to this kind of thing, but it's not surprising to find out that what gets peddled around as industry data is still pretty much bullshit. Remember, "industry data" is typically generated by those within the industry, and they have their own agendas.

Whoot!

I finished refreshing Trust, and that's been uploaded. Whoo! I have to say, as long as you don't have the problems I did when you convert a file to DOCX, Kindle Create is really easy to use, and I will probably be using it with the next books, since they won't have art.

Speaking of a book that does have art--I downloaded the version of The Weirld that's on sale, and ARGH. I went through a lot of trouble with the HTML editor making it so there wouldn't be spaces between the paragraphs, and lo and behold, there are spaces now. Obviously it's not worth fixing because it will just break itself again, but honestly--highly irritating.

So, that wasn't bad

I got up to #16 in Sword & Sorcery and #104 in Teen & Young Adult!

Again, WAY better than I thought I would be doing with this campaign. Also got a couple of likes on my Facebook page, so that's promising. (Still no clicks on the Amazon campaign even with the higher price--I'm just not getting many impressions from them.)

I went through and finished my first pass fixing the paragraph breaks and italics for Trust. The paper copy I have smells too much like cat pee, though! I'm chucking it after this and will order a new copy when I order copies of The Weirld.

Trang is done

I finished going through Trang and fixing the hard return and italic problems, so I submitted the fancier-looking version to Amazon.

I also felt vain and impulsive and started a Facebook and Amazon ad campaign for the free days of The Weirld. Obviously that's not going to pay for itself unless people get that book for free, then get Trang for free, and then pay for Trust, but I'm hoping it will get the book some reviews and maybe get the algorithms to work for it.

Sometimes it's good to have low expectations

My shot today wasn't entirely debilitating, so I fixed a lot of the italics and hard return issues with Trang (and did the same for the first couple of chapters of Trust, since they also appear at the end of Trang). Then I went through the Kindle Create process--that does seem to be pretty easy to use, although I've been screwed around often enough that I'm going to put in a 0.01" indent on everything that I don't want indented. It basically acts like a really easy-to-use HTML editor.

The main issue for me is that if you "publish" the file in their spanking new KPF format, you can't download the result or even sideload it onto your phone. I understand that they really, really want Kindle Create to be kind of the ultimate What You See Is What You Get editor, but 1. that's impossible, sorry, and 2. at least let me put this on my phone so I can switch chairs!

Oh well--I shall watch television instead and work on this tomorrow.

And The Weirld should become free at midnight tonight!

The e-book has been submitted!

YEAAAAA!!!!!

God, that seemed like such a process--part of it being that, if you're going to force me to learn Kompozer, I'm going to go ahead and make the book a little nicer.

Anyway: I have submitted the e-book to Amazon, and hopefully it will be up soon. Then I can do the five-day free promotion, whoo! 

All righty....

So, today was spent getting the hang of Kompozer--you can do a lot with it, but my God, it is not an intuitive piece of software.

I had to use Kompozer because it's an HTML editor, and Amazon has actually gone backwards in terms of what you can do with your e-book without getting into the HTML. As I mentioned, chapter ornaments are suddenly this HUGE problem, and other things are harder to do, too--it's really annoying that they've actually managed to make it harder to create a decent-looking book, because it seems like with Kindle Create, you're going to have so many nice interiors now.

Anyway, I think I'm 99% of the way there.

ETA: I do think I'm going to sacrifice the chapter ornaments for Trang and Trust and reformat them through Kindle Create one of these days. I kind of want to update them anyway, because there's stuff like the links in the back that don't work any more.

Progress report

I (hopefully) fixed the cover issues, and I have submitted the whole, improved shebang to Create Space--I should be able to order a second proof tomorrow if all goes well. I turned the first proof over to my crack team of illustrators, who were both delighted and chagrined to see their artwork in an actual book.

The e-book stuff is still fairly aggravating--I'm having to slog away editing HTML, and honestly it feels like Amazon has really made zero progress when it comes to books with art. I think I can make this work, and of course it still takes less time than a paper layout, but I also think it's been six years, and maybe they could have made this process a little easier in the meantime? Maybe?