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!

Just one of those days that makes you technophobic...

I got the large-print proof of Tribulations, and there were some changes that needed to be made both to the cover and to the interior.

So I had to fire up my old computer, which…yeah. At this point I’m like, How did I survive with this thing? Everything takes FOREVER.

But I made the changes and put the files on the new computer to upload. And then Amazon started doing the same damned thing it did last time I tried to upload the large-print version of Tribulations, which was to not process a PNG file. Keep in mind, it did fine with a PNG file when I did the hardcover version of A Dislocated World a whopping two day ago.

So I had to work with GIMP on the new computer and generate a PDF file. Currently Amazon is chewing over the print preview—fingers crossed I can order a second (and maybe even final!) proof sometime today.

Is this all because the book is so damned big?

Lordy

I had one of those impulses that finds you THREE HOURS LATER cursing your own very nature. Amazon has started offering the ability to make hardcovers, and while I don’t think that’s necessary for the fiction, A Dislocated World has sold quite a bit in paper, plus it seems to be of interest to the sorts of institutions that might prefer hardcover. And of course I was like, How hard can it be! I’ve already got it going on in paper!

The interior didn’t require changes—the hardcover are available in a more limited range of sizes, but luckily (?) A Dislocated World is my only paperback already in the correct size.

The cover is the sticky bit, because you can’t just adjust your existing paper cover—much like with the large-print edition, it’s too different. I put together a new one from scratch, which was when I discovered that my existing version of GIMP doesn’t actually play that well with the new computer. They’re putting out a new version that will, but it’s not quite ready yet.

I powered through and have ordered a proof of the hardcover, so I’ll let everyone know how that works (it’s still in beta, according to Amazon).

The business with GIMP made me realize that I needed to look at some of my other software. I was wondering if TextEdit had advanced to the point where I could just not use LibreOffice, but looking at it, I don’t think it has—it just edits text, and I need more. But I am updating stuff, so hopefully everything will be a little more stable and smoother now. (ETA: There is also Pages, which I’ve never used before. I might give that a go.)

Progress report

Well, I wasn’t able to order the large-print proof last night because Amazon wasn’t able to upload the cover as a PNG. So today I figured out how to make a workable PDF. Amazon was able to preview the book for me earlier in the day (some of the front matter is in! the! gutter!), but then it couldn’t preview. Now it seems to have fixed itself, so I have ordered the proof. Yay!

I’m working on switching computers—this one is much older than I thought it was—so in case the software I usually use doesn’t play well on the new machine I also prepped the versions of the e-book that will go onto Smashwords in a couple of months.

Progress report

I proofread & corrected chapters 22-26, and then I laid out chapters 27-31. I’m going to wait on proofreading them until tomorrow, at which point I’ll also reupload any corrections to the e-book (they’re all quite minor) and order what should be the final proof of the trade paperback. It will be nice to have that more or less finally off my plate.

After a literal decade of using this desktop, I’ve ordered a new one, so I’ll have to start migrating stuff soon…blah. At least I’m not completely swapping operating systems this time around. My thinking is that I should polish everything off on the old computer just in case the newer software doesn’t play well/predictably with the older versions.

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.)

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.

Covers covers covers

The proofs of The Weirld and Trang arrived today with the new covers, plus I updated the large-print cover of Trang. I approved The Weirld for sale with a minor change, but Trang is going to need another proof—like any other printer, when Amazon tells you “The bar code goes here!” what that really means is that the bar code will show up in that general area, hopefully. So I needed to put a little extra space between some of the elements and that bar code to give it the room it needs to roam….

As I was previewing the large-print edition of Trang, I realized there was an error inside the book—some of the page numbers in the first chapter are italicized when they shouldn’t be. So I went back and looked at the old files, and I can’t fix it—that was back when I was masochistic and laid out books in Word, which was never especially stable even back then. Nowadays, I can’t open a Word file and have the layout look anything like it used to. So, my apologies for the error, but it ain’t getting fixed!

What is the purpose of a proof, again?

Amazon wanted me to fiddle with the paperback pricing, because they’re selling paperbacks in Australia now. Fine by me—all the paperbacks except Dislocated World were done on CreateSpace, and there’s some weirdness with the distribution in Amazon’s markets as a result, so I figured I’d fix that.

Then I got to feeling like I should order proofs of the paperback versions of Trang, Trust, and The Weirld, because who knows? Strange things can happen when you switch printers.

I did that, they came…and yeah, they look a little funny now. Like, the covers are there and the interiors are there, so you’re getting a book, but they definitely rendered a little differently, and I feel like they could all use a bit of an update just so that the type is clear and whatnot. You know, once I have the chance to do that. In the meantime I went ahead and approved them, since they’re readable and whatnot.

Aaaand Amazon just told me that Trust cannot be approved for publication because the cover has errors on it.

Remember: I ordered a proof. If there are the kind of errors that make a cover so that it can’t be published, that’s supposed to come up before the writer pays for the proof. Traditionally, the proof is supposed to be the finished product, and proof approval = ready to go.

I guess when you’re deliberately making the proof cover so that no one can see the art, this all makes perfect sense.

Progress report

Kind of an ugh day—the pollen count is…where it is. I’m partially through Part 2, which is slow going because 1. Part 2 is HUGE, and 2. there are definitely a lot more errors in it. The good news is that transferring things from a trade paperback index to a large-print index is definitely a really good way to proofread—I’m catching a lot of typos, or places where the trade paperback index is off by a page. The bad news is that of course finding and fixing those errors takes a lot of time.

Then on top of everything, the copy editor contacted me to tell me he couldn’t find the Tribulations layout. Turns out that I had deleted the PDF, so I had to convert the chapters and put them together again. That also might be a good thing in the long run, since the way I had done the PDF before made it harder to work with. (I honestly don’t really understand the different flavors of PDFs, I’ve just realized that if you want to do this with a PDF, you should make it this was in Scribus, but if you want to do that, you should make it that way.)

Progress report

I was a little light on sleep, so I thought that today, instead of doing the Part 2 layout, I’d set up the rest of the large-print edition in LibreOffice so that it would all be set to be laid out.

Aaaaand in the process, I realized that the Strike Thru coding in LibreOffice didn’t translate to Scribus. Furthermore, it never translated, meaning that the trade paperback doesn’t have things struck out in it, either!

I was a bit aiiigh! about it all, but then I realized that fixing that wouldn’t change the layout any. So as long as Proof #3 comes back OK, I think I can risk it and not order Proof #4. Since I was updating the interior anyway, I took the time to really look through the interior Proof #3 and found a couple of (very minor) things there to fix as well.

If you’re following along at home:

The Dislocated World trade paperback Proof #3 is coming to me soon, and hopefully once it gets here, I’ll be able approve the edition for sale

The Dislocated World large-print paperback is about halfway through production

Trials is still unwritten aside from part of the first draft. I thought I could switch off between writing and doing layouts, but I never seem to be able to do more than one thing at a time….

Progress report

Since yesterday went well enough, today I was like, “I should get going on that large-print edition.”

Dear God.

For starters, LibreOffice decided to crash rather spectacularly. It crashes so much less often than Word that I get confused when it does. And this was one of those sneaky stealth crashes, where it pretends like it’s saving what you’re doing, but then you realize that you’ll have to do it all over again.

So I restarted everything and worked in a manner designed to put the fewest expectations on LibreOffice, and I managed to get each part saved so that it’s at least roughly ready to be laid out.

Then I laid out the Introduction and started on Part 1—oy. The very large parts of this book mean that the large-print sections are HUGE. The main design issue is that I don’t think I can line up the bottoms given the fact that there are letters and explanatory passages that I’m trying to make look different from each other in a way that doesn't utterly run afoul of the APH guidelines. I’m not thrilled about that—I think uneven text blocks in a layout look really amateurish and shitty—but if you’re following APH you’re already sacrificing design for accessibility, so I guess I just have to accept it. I mean, it’s World War II nonfiction—which skews to an older audience that is more likely to be visually-impaired—so arguably this is the most-important book for me to make accessible.

ETA: I updated LibreOffice, which will either make things better or SO MUCH WORSE…..

Progress report

The allergies are interfering with sleep, so I decided to prep Dislocated World for when it leaves Amazon and goes to other e-retailers. A lot of removing tabs and that sort of routine stuff—the main concern is that when the file is converted, it will fuck up all the italics and underlines and strike-thrus, but there’s not a lot I can do about that at this point. Just got it as clean as I could, and fingers crossed that the conversion goes well.

At least it's done

Yesterday and today were committed to 1. inputting corrections to the e-book that I caught while laying out the paper book, and 2. uploading the interior manuscript and cover for the paper version to Amazon.

It took two days, and it wasn’t like #1 was the problem. Amazon’s changed the old CreateSpace platform—I don’t know if it’s any less fiddly than CreateSpace, but it’s fiddly in a different way. You make a PDF this way, and it works just fine, but if you make a PDF that way, all is lost.

I did a PDF of the cover and uploaded it—and the software oriented it vertically rather than horizontally, which of course was confusing for all concerned. There was no way to adjust that in Amazon’s software that I could find, so I decided that the best way around was to upload a PNG file into Amazon’s “Cover Creator” program, which worked…except Cover Creator did the whole 90/10 thing Amazon tends to do, where 90% of their software is really intuitive and easy to use, while 10% is completely opaque.

Case in point: I decided after previewing my cover that I wanted to adjust a few things, so I needed to swap out the PNG file (which was the entire cover) for a new one. Well, good luck figuring out how to do that! The very simple, easy-to-use interface had nothing telling you how to do that, you couldn’t go back to an “upload my image” page, and it was all saved so that shutting everything down and starting over helped not at all—the old PNG file was, to all appearances, there to stay.

Finally I found instructions on a completely separate page that wasn’t part of Cover Creator—and all you have to do is click on a certain part of your image, and then this super-easy, super-clear drop-down menu will emerge from hiding and you’re back in The Good 90% of Amazon. I mean, I’m grateful that they’ve got The Good up to 90%, but one unintended side effect of the 90/10 contrast is that it makes you feel really stupid—this tool is so easy to use, once you’ve unearthed it from its secret tomb.

Anyway, I’ve ordered a proof (always always order a proof!), and assuming that looks OK, the paper book will be up on Amazon sooner rather than later. (ETA: Well, Amazon’s proofs are definitely cheaper than CreateSpace—you can splurge on expedited shipping, but I didn’t, and it was less than $10.)

After that, I have some non-book stuff that needs attention, but then I’ll get back to writing Trials until Tribulations comes back from the copy editor. I do still intend to do large-print editions, but I’m a little layout-out’d at the moment, and I’m going to have to do more with layouts once Tribulations returns.

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…..

Progress report

Finally got Tribulations to the copy editor…I think? We’re having quite a time with technology these days.

In the meantime, I’ve inputted a bunch of changes to Dislocated World—hopefully in a couple of days I can start getting it ready for Amazon!

Progress report

Whoo-hoo! Dislocated World is back from the copy editor!

I’ve begun inputting those changes, but then I was going to print out the Tribulations layout to mail to him, buuuut…the computer is being weird, and the printer won’t print the layout properly. So I’m having to fiddle with stuff to get him a proper PDF. Ugh. This kind of stuff always throws a wrench in the works.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

I did blurbs/jacket copy for both Tribulations and A Dislocated World today—now I’m working on getting appropriate measurement for the Tribulations cover, since I know how many pages it will be. Amazon took over CreateSpace, and their tools are frankly a bit clunky and involve extra steps and more opportunities for software incompatibilities—if you just give me an online calculator, I can do the rest, thank you very much. Anyway, at this point I think everything is going to work. Fingers crossed!

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....