Sheila and Sara

Rather sooner than I'd planned, mind you, but I was under the impression I'd be able to set up a postdated release date for the Kindle. No such luck. It's up and I've just got to deal with it. You can get the Kindle version so far. As of this writing, I am still waiting to hear back from Apple about setting up the EPUB version in the iTunes bookstore. It's still something of an odd abstraction at this point, but I'll be posting soon about what I've learned from the process.

I've finalized the ebooks and sent copies to my publisher. Going to have a long and quiet evening at home to celebrate.

ISBNs have been acquired. I'll be meeting with the head of Lullwater Press this evening. (A fancy way of saying "I'm stopping by Mom and Dad's house for dinner.") Guess it's time to do one more grind and polish on the book itself. I'm sure there are folks out there who are curious about the nuts and bolts process of ebook publishing, so I'll do my best to keep you posted.

The acquisition of ISBNs for my upcoming ebook has hit a slight snag, as it seems Bowker is confused by the fact that Lullwater Press previously obtained the ISBN for their first publication via LuLu and is now asking for a batch of them directly. I figure I can at least work on a final grind and polish while waiting for this matter to sort itself out. The next phase is going to have to be the dreaded M-word: marketing. It's not my strong point by any means, and certainly one of the reasons I steered clear of the very thought of self publishing for so long. Granted, by putting these out as electronic editions, at least some of the heavy lifting in the Letting People Know It Exists Department will be handled by large, scary corporations. But I know from experience that merely offering something for sale on the Internet is no assurance that anybody will notice, let alone make a purchase. Non-skeevy marketing in the Internet age seems to break down to three simple (if not always ...

I've given the words themselves one more going-over--by printing it out and scribbling corrections on the pages, funnily enough. It was a little trickier making the corrections directly in the HTML code, but I kept an eye on the results in my favorite browser and reloaded with each change to make sure I didn't bork anything. Unfortunately, I still did bork something, but it was undetectable until I converted the results into ebook form. Since I'd been using Calibre for conversion, I also took advantage of the ability to construct a Table of Contents that certain ebook reading devices can access. This requires using HTML tags at the start of each chapter and then telling Calibre which ones to detect and use accordingly. Initially, I'd used 'a name=' tags so I could also construct a working Table of Contents within the book itself. This did odd things to the TOC when I read it on my iPhone (it kept duplicating each chapter heading each time the book was opene...

So a little HTML hackage in TextWrangler and some Calibre magic have provided my ebook with a workable Table of Contents that links directly to the chapters. The nice thing about HTML as an ebook writing medium is that you can check the formatting in short order by firing up your favorite browser and opening the file with it. This way I was able to test my tags and fix them instantly instead of loading things onto the iPhone and then finding out that they were borked. It's still a rather short work, some twenty-odd pages on the iPad, but this is a how-to book rather than a novel, so I can hope that its utility will make up for its brevity. I'm not planning on charging more than a buck or so for it anyway. I think the next steps are one last going-over for revision, finalizing the cover and then getting it set up on iBooks and Amazon. Yikes.

After a long pause and much procrastination, I've resumed work on hashing out my wee little ebook. A few things I've learned: 1. Calibre works wonders for rendering .odt files into something resembling an ebook. So far I've done a few test drafts that I've been able to look at on my iPhone and iPad in three different reading apps (Stanza, Kindle and iBooks) to catch and mend the flaws and glitches. 2. Optimal size for an ebook cover image is 600 x 800 pixels . This allows it to play nicely with the Kindle and looks fine on iBooks as well. My test cover was originally rendered as 6000 x 8000 pixels (slow going, but still functional) and then scaled down to fit. PNG looks better than JPG, by the way. 3. Get rid of the double space after the period. It looks funny when rendered on a page, even an electronic one. 4. Make sure there are no gaps before the page break, or you may wind up with a blank page in the middle of everything, depending on how the pages come o...