Formatting an ebook: New Amazon tool for self-published authors

If you want to self-publish ebooks, you need to learn some things about ebooks. Ebooks are really just files, and in those files the underlying format is HTML tagging. the same tagging that drives the web. There are two main sets of tagging schemes. Epub (sometimes written as ePub) works for iBooks, Nook, and pretty much all others bookstores. Amazon's Kindle, though, has its own format based on mobi. It still uses HTML tags, remember, but it's a different set of rules on which tags do what and how files are structured.

Amazon's KDP platform for self-publishing actually allows authors to upload a MS Word file. If you have a novel that is all text, and you use Word's formatting styles consistently, KDP does a good job of converting the files. If you want new chapters to start on a new screen, for example, you need to be sure the word style for the chapter name or number creates a new page in print. But of course, you can't really tweak the format easily. If you want to change something, you need to go back to Word, edit the file, reload it to KDP, and look at it again. If you have the kind of book that has fancy formatting or lots of images, this can be tedious.

As first reported by The Digital Reader, Amazon has launched  a beta version of a new tool called Kindle Create.  The Talking New Media blog checked it out, too, and reported on their first impressions.

The new tool is different because you download it and run it locally, o your PC or Mac, and then preview the results from within the app itself. It takes over 500 MB of disc space, but hard drives are pretty big these days. 

Although the Amazon page only mentions Word files, the program will accept PDFs, but there was some discussion in the comments on the Talking New Media post that suggetsed it wasn't really converting the PDF but just wrapping it in code that made it into a "print replica" not a true ebook. 

I'm not sure this new took will help me that much since I have started putting my books out in paperback, also. I now use Adobe's InDesign which can produce a print-ready PDF and also an epub file from the same input. But if you self-publish books with a tricky format and want to try this new tool,Amazon is actively soliciting feedback.

A mystery about a mystery: How can two books have the same set of reviews?

I am quite fond of murder mysteries, especially British ones. One of my favorite authors is Dorothy L. Sayers, author of a series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, the younger son of a duke, and an amateur detective. I've read all of them, some of them many times,  When we renovated our house, I donated 18 cartons of books, including all my Sayers copies to the local thrift shop. However, when Open Road Media started reissuing them as ebooks, I bought some of them, so I could reread them when I felt like it. I loved what a fantastic job OR did on them. I even wrote a post about it.

Now, however, someone else is publishing Dorthy L Sayers (presumably, it's out of copyright) and they are no Open Road. You can tell it's a different version because it not only has a different cover, it has a different ASIN (Amazon's unique stock number). The Open Road cover is shown above.

I got an email promotion for Clouds of Witness for only 99¢ (ASIN = B00LDSUTMC). There was no warning on the Amazon page saying "You bought this book on [date]" so I didn't realize I already had the Open Road version (ASIN = B008JVJKXK). I bought the 99¢ version and it was terrible. I have never seen an ebook with so damn many errors!  Most obviously, there were 25 instances of [garbled] and 26 of [missing] they had not bothered to clean up.

They looks like this:

“[Garbled] least--not [garbled] see him. But there was poor Denis's body,

“My lords, it is your happy privilege [missing] his grace the Duke of Denver these [missing] of his exalted rank. When the clerk [missing] address to you severally the solemn [missing] find Gerald, Duke of Denver, [missing] guilty or not guilty of the dreadful [missing] every one of you may, with a confidence [missing] any shadow of doubt, lay his hand and say, 'Not guilty, upon my honour.'“

There were also plenty of plain old typos:

“What did you say you found on that skin Bunter?” (this should say "skirt," not skin)
. . .and bunked Silly-ass thing to do . . . * (missing the period at the end of the sentence)
“The position of the fingers being towards the house appears, does it not, to negative the suggestion of dragging?” (should be "negate")

But because it turns out Amazon lumps the various editions together, there is one set of reviews. You see the same reviews for the Open Road version, the crappy, cheapo version, and the print version. People are giving the book one star because this version looks so bad!

 I didn't write a review, but I did email Amazon and ask for my money back. It had been more than the 7-day limit, but they credited me anyway. I wish they would make the seller take down the new version.  Formatting that could make me feel cheated after paying 99¢ is truly terrible formatting.

Doing digital the right way: Open Road

Open Road Integrated Media is a digital-only publisher and because digital is the main event, not merely a sideline, they do it right! A lot of their books are (sometimes quite old) back-list titles, which for other publishers often means they would be scanned from paper and slapped up as ebooks with hardly a second look. Sometimes publishers don't bother getting a cover for the ebook. Again, not Open Road!

I recently bought some Lord Peter books for my Kindle. Dorothy L. Sayers was a British mystery writer who created a wonderful amateur detective named Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers died in 1957, so none of these books is even close to new, but Open Road not only did a great job in putting them into the proper format, they commissioned a wonderful, imaginative set of new covers! I've included a few here so you can see what I mean.

Lord Peter was a wealthy, well dressed aristocrat, so each cover shows a man's torso in an outfit suited (pardon the pun) to the story. And of course, Lord Peter's signature monocle appears above the title.

When I read on my Kindle, I highlight any formatting problems that I notice. When I finished my first Lord Peter Kindle book from OR, I checked and there was no highlighting—not a single formatting error!

In addition, OR has figured out that one of the strengths of ebooks is you can change the price as often as you like. The Lord Peter books generally sell for $7.00 to $9.99 in the Kindle store, but OR put three of them on sale for $2.99 or less. Now, I have actually read all these books. I used to own them in paperback, but I gave them away to a good home. But at that price, I bought those three books so I can read them again whenever I feel like it without having them take any space in my downsized bookshelves.

There you go! Quality books, quality formatting, quality covers, and flexible pricing. That is the way to do ebooks right!

I'm guest blogging today!

I have a post on The Serious Reader blog today! It's all about what causes the many errors we (sadly) still find in ebooks. The site also has lots of reviews as well as my post. Check it out!

Writing a book is a lot like giving birth

I'm not the first writer to compare producing a book with producing a baby. I once heard Dan Simmons say that publishing a book was like putting your baby into a carriage and parking it on the sidewalk for passersby (in this case, book reviewers) to revile it and call it names.

A big difference is that babies generally take nine months to produce while books can take anywhere from several weeks to many long years. When you are an aspiring author with a finished manuscript, your “baby” is not only unborn, it is still highly mutable. If you change your mind about a character or a plot point, or you think of something you want (or even need) to add, you can do it. Thanks to the wonders of word processing, the only difficulty in making changes is keeping track of versions.

But once you publish, either traditionally publish or self-publish, the baby is out there for all to see. The other day I had a sudden insight into a situation in Shades of Empire that would be helped by adding a mention of something about the protagonist's motivation. Immediately, it occurred to me that I could not easily add that in as I have already published the book!

Now of course, with ebooks, I could edit and reload the book, but for anything less than mortifying mistakes, that way lies madness. What if you fix or add one thing and then think of something else? When would it stop? Besides, if you're like me and you rely on a conversion house to produce the Kindle and epub versions, you might need to pay for every edit. There are also folks who make the argument that editing a story post-publication is unfair to reviewers whose comments may no longer apply. Really, you shouldn't be publishing a book unless it's “done.”

That said, there are times when the ease of digital changes come in handy. A major part of today's ebookstore “stock” consists of yesterday's books, the backlists of published authors. In some cases, the publisher has (or negotiates) ebook rights, and in others the author self-publishes his or her backlist. But in either instance, some of these books are decades old. YA fantasy author Diane Duane recently decided to republish her 1980's fantasy So You want to Be a Wizard as an ebook, but first she updated it in a bunch of ways. She has named the new version the New Millenium Edition to make it clear there is a difference.

Again, there are trade-offs. As this post on Teleread points out, people get miffed at the idea that they have to pay for the book again to get the “director's cut.” On the other hand, the new edition might offer a better chance of reaching new readers. As always, new technology makes work easier and faster to do, but that doesn't mean it's always a good idea to use it.

Self-publishing: The 10-Step Program

Many people ask me about this, once they find out I have self-published, so I thought I would put the info into a post that I can just refer them to it; I may also load this to its own page on this site, if needed.

Once you have decided to self-publish, what are the steps involved?

1. Commit! The very first thing is to make sure you want to make a big commitment in either time or money or both. Publishing is work, if you do it right. You either have to do it all yourself, or get someone else to do it for love or for money.
2. Review and edit! Next, make sure your story is ready. Every book should go through an editorial review process, either by being read by an editor or by a group of other writers, or at the very least, by someone other than your mother. This is not  merely to get validation that your story is good; it is to get the feedback you need to make the story better. This will often include getting comments about characterization, dialog, pacing, and other things that make a book easy to read.  Once you have these comments, you need to decide what to change in your book.
3. Copyedit! Once the substantive edits are made, you need to get someone to copyedit the book. Copyediting is distinct process, different from substantive edits. Copyeditors check style, grammar, word usage, and the internal logic of the story. Do you say the protagonist is 23 in Chapter One but a year later in Chapter Two is he suddenly 26? A good copyeditor will catch these things. If you know one, cherish him or her; if not, you might be able to trade copyediting work with another writer, as copyediting your own work is really hard. Don't pay someone to do this unless you are sure they are qualified; if you're not sure, I suggest you hire them only to copyedit a sample (10 or 20 pages, say) as a check of their abilities.
4. Pick the platforms! Decide if you will publish in print or as an ebook or both, and then decide what platforms you will sell your book through (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, iBooks, etc.). For ebooks, the publishing platform is usually the retail outlet as well. For print books you will also need to be sure your book is laid out in pages, in a way that looks good and is readable. You also need to decide how you would get your printed book to customers. Two good print platforms for self-publishing are CreateSpace and Lulu.
5. Get a decent cover! If you have an eye for design, you might be able to make your own, especially if you know how to use PhotoShop. But there are artists out there who will create a cover for you for about $200 on up (way up!). Be aware of copyright issues where photographs and artwork are concerned. You definitely can't steal someone else's images from the web if you are putting them on work that is for sale. If you publish in print, you need to worry about the whole cover (front, back, and spine), not just a single front-cover image. Be sure to check the cover requirements for every platform you plan to publish on.
6. Layout the pages/style the files! If you're publishing in print, you need a PDF of your pages.  If you're publishing in ebook form, you need to convert from word processing format to ebook format. The PubIt platform (Barnes & Noble) uses ePub format, Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon) has its own format based on Mobi-pocket, and Smashwords has its own style guide for formatting an MS Word file in a way that works for their conversion program (ominously dubbed "the meat grinder"). Again, you can pay someone or you can do your own conversion using Calibre or Scrivener. If you aren't tech-ey and you can't afford a conversion house, KDP actually accepts many formats, as does PubIt, but then you have to take whatever formatting you get. If you want to control what your book looks like, you might do better to put it into the right format to begin with. Default conversions often yield bland-looking or even badly formatted ebooks. Smashwords has said they will eventually accept ePub, but for right now you are stuck using their MS Word and their style guide.   
7. Proof again! Assuming you convert the books or have them converted, once you have files in the right format, it is really a good idea to load them into an ereader or an ereader app and proof them again to be sure you don't have formatting errors like run-together words, bad paragraph indenting, and so on.    
8. Decide about ISBNs! Before you load your book, you need to decide if you want to get your own International Standard Book Number (ISBN). It costs money to get them for yourself, but if you want the book to have an ISBN on all platforms, you will need to do that.  Smashwords will assign one for you if your book is formatted well enough to go into their premium catalog, but that won't work for print or the Kindle because you need an ISBN for each format (print, Kindle ebook, ePub ebook). You can purchase ISBNs from Bowker.
9. Write a blurb! Once you have the cover, the files you need to load the book, the ISBN (if needed), you need to write a blurb for the book, and decide what tags you will apply to it (mystery, adventure, science fiction, etc.). The blurb should be short and oriented toward making someone interested in reading the book rather than being a plot synopsis. Tags will vary depending on the platform.
10. Create a marketing plan! Finally, have a marketing plan in place. Once your book is for sale, how will people know it? You can contact book review blogs and offer a free copy of the book, you can plead for reviews on Amazon and other retail sites, and (in some cases) you can make the book free for a short period of time. 

Once you've done all this, then you're ready to publish. Check out how it works on the platforms you're using and get going!

eBook production update

The fantasy novella Where Magic Rules is done, and Shades of Empire is back from the copyeditor. I'm making final edits on the novel now.  Everything should be ready to go to 52 Novels, the conversion house, in about two weeks. I use them because they don't just convert the files, they impose a distinct design on the books, applying a style for scene breaks and chapter headings. If I just wanted to convert the text, I could use Calibre or Scrivener, but I don't know ebook formats well enough to be able to impose that style myself.

The one drawback to using a conversion house is that unless you know what you're doing, you can't edit the files easily once you get them back. Ergo, careful proofing before you submit the m.s. is essential. I use Calibre to convert my MS Word file so that I can proof on my Kindle, which I find very helpful. Them, when I get the files back from 52 Novels, I send the Kindle version to my Kindle and proof yet again to be sure that everything came through okay. This is especially important for things like blocks of indented text or places where you rely on italics to convey something other than ordinary narrative and dialog.  52 Novels will do minor corrections and certainly fix anything that didn't convert well, but you don't want to ask for substantive edits at this point because it would cost you.

This stage is exciting and tedious at the same time. Inserting commas and rewording awkward or unclear phrasing  is much less fun than writing. On the other hand, it means the book is near to being out there in the world, which is what every writer wants!
 
In some ways, it's a lot like those last few weeks of pregnancy. I'm about to have a bouncing baby ebook, and in this case it's twins!