Saturday, March 08, 2014

Book preparation

Took some time off yesterday from the prostate book. It's heading towards its final form, I think, and I need to step back a bit and get some different perspective on it.

In the interim, I began work on preparing my other book, Grimhilda!, for publication on Smashwords. This turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected, and I had to work through their manual very slowly to work out what I need to do to ensure the book format is right for their processing. (The 'meatgrinder' as the writer calls it.)

Firstly I had to pare the whole text back to its bare bones, which is a bit annoying, as not only does all the formatting go, but italics go as well, and will have to be replaced manually. However, Smashwords works from a Word document, surprisingly, rather than an epub version, and the Word version has to be as simple as...no colours, no large fonts, or peculiar ones, no this, no that. It's because Smashwords takes your file and distributes it to a wide range of e-formats. The simpler the original file is, the better. It's noticeable that the look of Grimhilda! on the iPad is different to the look of it on Kindle. Certain things change. So I won't be trying to do anything fancy this time; just keeping it simple and hoping that that will do the trick.

I want to get it up and running by mid-April, at the latest, so I thought I'd better get on and get started. Just as well I did. It's going to take longer than I anticipated!

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