It gets better, ebook edition

There used to be so many error in ebooks! I can't tell you how frustrated I was, especially when the errors would be totally obvious things like diacritical marks becoming garbage characters, so that any word with a tilde or an accent became unreadable. I recall being overjoyed to find out a book I had loved in high school (Rebel Spurs, by Andre Norton,long out of print, but it appears to be free in the Kindle store, although possibly it's a different edition) was on Kindle, and crushed when I read it and discovered just how badly a careless publisher could mess up a scanned book. I also enjoy the novels of Georgette Heyer, the historical ones more than the mysteries. Often those had errors, too, but recently I read The Toll Gate on my Kindle and was pleased there was exactly one typo (or possibly scanning error). The word “too” followed by an exclamation mark had been rendered as “tool” (with no punctuation to end the sentence). I used the spiffy new feature I mentioned in my post on the new Kindle Touch upgrade to report the error to Amazon. I will post about the results, and what feedback I get. But still, one typo in an entire novel is not bad, not bad at all! It did get better!

Countdown to publication

I've delivered Shades of Empire to the conversion house and I've gotten back the novella Where Magic Rules. I'm proofing the novella on the Kindle now; that final post-conversion proof is really important. 52 Novels does a good job, but MS Word is not a great format to convert from. So far everything looks pretty good. the only conversion errors I have seen have been with double and single quote marks occasionally going the wrong way (e.g., what should be a close quote comes through as an open quote).

After some soul searching, I have decided to publish the novella as a Kindle Select book. That means for 90 days it will be available only on the Kindle. I really don't want to limit my readership that way. I know a lot of folks with Sony or Kobo or Nook readers (like this blogger) hate it when an ebook is only available on Amazon. But if I make it a Kindle Select book, I can make it free in the Kindle store for short periods of time, and that's a valuable tool.

When you think of it, it's kind of amazing that being able to give away your work should be so important, but that's the way it is in the digital world.