David Lubar's Blog, page 5

My eBook eXperience -- interlude

Tomorrow, I'll pick up where I left off, covering my transition from the Kindle to the Nook. I had to get up very early this morning, and I suspect I'm too fuzzy to do a good job.

But I'll leave you with one thought. Search-and-replace is your friend. You can do amazing things with it. I once had a manuscript that had been scanned into text. All the tabs were gone. (This was for a print book that was going to the copy editor, so the tabs were sort of important.) No problem. In Word, you just replace ^p (the symbol for a new paragraph) with ^p^t (paragraph, tab). Just like that, the tabs are back. You don't even need to know the symbols. Just select "more" and you can get to special things like page breaks, tabs, etc, as well as format items such as fonts and styles. You can search for all text in Heading 1, for example. But -- and this is IMPORTANT -- make sure to clear any special styles or type faces from your search when you are done. Why? Because they'll still be there if you search for something later. You might thing you're searching for the word "platypus," but the search is looking for "platypus" in bold face, or in Heading 1 style, or whatever. All of that stuff is listed in tiny text beneath the search box.

Okay. Enough for this morning. Check back tomorrow for a look at the EPub segment of my adventure.

My eBook eXperience -- part three of many

In which I get my manuscript into Kindle format...

I believe you can send a Word doc, rtf file, or other format to Amazon, and they will send it back in Kindle format. But, a hacker at heart (in the old-school sense of the word), I wanted to get as close to the source as possible. Mobipocket Creator is a free application that turns a Word or html document into a prc file, which is one of the Kindle formats. Here's where I encountered my first compelxity. I have Word 97 on my desktop PC. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur. It's even worse than that. I just use Word to convert my mansucripts before I send them out, since I write everything using Word Perfect 5.1, running under DOS. I call it The Blue Screen of Life.) I have Word whatever (some fairly new version from this century) on my laptop.

Here's the problem. Either version of Word can write an html file. The new version of Word preserved my page breaks, but didn't seem to preserve my table of contents (TOC). The old version did just the opposite. (I later discovered that I couldn't use Word's TOC generator for my Smashwords file.) Word 97 produced a much cleaner html file. This might not really matter. If the file works on the Kindle, you might think it it isn't a problem if the html was messy. But what if newer versions of the Kindle had problems with bad html? I wanted the source to be as pure and clean as possible. Solution -- I loaded my Word doc into Open Office, and wrote out the html from there.

Here come some technical tips. Anyone not formatting a Kindle book can skip this paragraph. I learned a lot by looking at the html generated by Open Office. If you're doing this, the first thing to do is check the styles at the top. Word has a bad habit of changing or adding styles. I thought I was only using Header 1 and Header 2. But, in the Open office html, I saw definitions for h1, h2, h3, and h4. (It was easy to find them in the original doc with a search.) Now, I wanted to remove as much of the unnecessary formatting as possible. That was easy. The html defined a paragraph style, followed by a western version. I just did a search-and-replace to change CLASS="western" to nothing. (I use Arachnophilia for editing html. For those of you who are keeping count, we're up to four pieces of software -- Word, Open Office, MobiPocket Creator, and Arachnophilia. There will be more.)

Let me pause here a moment and reiterate that I am not claiming I did anything the easiest or smartest way. I just stumbled along, and had a lot of fun. I felt like I was back in my programming days. For me, the thrill was in figuring out why something didn't work they way I thought it should (or work at all), and by finding ways to get around the problems. I figured I could pass along some of the ways I removed various stumbling blocks. Which brings me to the biggie. Mobipocket Creator does an amazing job. It even has a wonderfully powerful TOC generator. (By this point, I'd deleted the TOC I'd generated within Word, and just used H1 and H2 styles for the parts of the book.) But there are two small problems. The TOC is done as an unordered list with bullet points, and it is put at the top of the book, before the title page, copyright page, etc. (The thing that can confuse people is that the TOC genrated by this software appears in two ways. It shows up when you use the Kindle's "go to" feature. It also shows up as a page or pages in the book.)

There are solutions for each problem. Mobipocket Creator lets you include mutliple html files. So I removed my title page, put it into html, and saved it as a separate file. For those using Mobi, here are the steps. Load the main html file. Load the title-page file. Make the TOC. Highlight the title-page file and slide it to the top of the list. Done. (Not counting non-related stuff like the cover and metadata.). If the bullet points bother you, you can change the html. It's in a file called "mbp_toc." The problem is, the file is genrated without any line breaks, so it is hard to read and modify unless you massage it first. If you want to play with it, try replacing all UL and LI entries (along with the brackets, to avoid messing up regular words) with P or BR. (Remember, if you need to regenerate the TOC, all your work will be written over.) I decided the bullet points didn't bother me.

So, now I had a Kindle version, just several hundred hours after I sat down to build it. Next time, onward to the Nook.

If you have a Kindle, you can download a sample to see how it came out.

My eBook eXperience -- part two of many

To recap -- I had a manuscript ready. Now, I had to decide which formats, outlets, and submission routes to take. Obviously, the Kindle represents a big chunk of the market, as does the ePub format, which is used by the Nook, the iPad, and Sony's reader. Everyone can read plain text, HTML, and pdf. (Everyone can also read Kindle and Nook ebooks on a PC or Mac if they download the free readers, but I suspect those apps don't have the ubiquity of the Adobe reader.) Anyone can publish an ebook directly through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. I first heard about Smashwords from Bruce Coville. They are a major independent service that sells ebooks on their site and also distributes to all the key outlets in all the key formats.

There was one other major consideration. As I looked into the best way to distribute review copies, I discovered that Amazon and Barnes and Noble didn't offer a method to give someone a free copy of a Nook or Kindle ebook, other than buying a gift certificate. Smashwords allowed people to generate coupons. They also allowed authors to decide which formats and which channels they wanted to use. So I could have an ePub that I put on Barnes and Noble, and also offer the ePub format at Smashwords. Smashwords, righfully so, takes a cut of the royalties for books they distribute to other outlets.

After looking at all of this, and weighing the royalties, I decided to put my book on Amazon and on Barnes and Noble myself, to get the full royalty, but also use Smashwords, so my book would be available in as many places as possible, and so I could offer coupons.

Now, all I had to do was generate three versions of my book. Amazon will accept a variety of formats, but converts all of them except the prc (mobi) format. Barnes and Noble wants ePub, and Smashwords wants a Word doc with very stringent (but rational) format requirmeents.

You might wonder why I was concerned about the way the formats were generated. If my book were a novel, it probably wouldn't matter. But It Seemed Funny at the Time: A large collection of short humor is, as the subtitle makes obvious, a large collection of short humor. The pieces required a wide variety of layouts. There are essays, lists, satirical book reviews, and other typographical nightmares. I needed to make sure it looked right. And I needed a massive table of contents. (This turned out to be quite the albatross. More about that, later.) Bottom line -- I was going to do as much as I could myself.

There are actually lots of people out there who format books for a reasonable price. But that wasn't the route I wanted to take. Hey, I used to write programs in assembly language for the Atari 2600, where you had to count machine cycles and make sure a branch didn't cross a page boundary. I decided to put my book into prc and ePub myself.

How hard could it be to format an ebook? We'll get to that next time.

My eBook eXperience -- part one of many

I just published my first eBook. In the process, I figured out some interesting technical problems. In the interest of saving other folks some time, I'm going to share what I discovered. (Note that I didn't say "share what I learned." I'm not very good at learning from my mistakes, and will probably repeat most of them.)

First, a non-technical issue. (I might not reach the technical stuff in this part, but it will come.) Why did I publish an eBook? I love my publisher. They treat me very well and work hard to promote my books. But one of my other loves is short humor. I've been writing it all my life. Some of my first sales were magazine pieces. So, given that I've been writing professionally since 1978, I have a lot of material on hand. Beyond pieces I wrote with the intent of making a sale, I have things I wrote for my own amusement, or to share with other writers. And I have humor I wrote for my keynotes and other conference talks. Basically, I had a boatload of stuff that I felt was worth sharing with a large audience. But some of it appealed only to special interests. If I tried to do it as a print book, a publisher would be unlikely to want me to include extra sections that had limited appeal. But, thanks to the current world-wide depression in the price of electrons, I could cram as much as I wanted into an eBook. I could also sell it for a low price. (In this case, just $2.99.) So it made sense to take the plunge.

Several of my fellow writers had already ventured into eBook territory. Most notable, April Henry, who published some of her early mysteries, Bruce Coville, who published an assortment of short stories, Pete Hautman, who also brought out an older mystery, and Roland Smith, who published a novel. All of these folks are established writers in the print world. They are also smart. (This isn't surprising, since good books tend to be written by smart people.) So I had some excellent role models and inspiration.

I assembled all my humor pieces, and culled any that I thought hadn't aged well. Then I divided the book into sections, putting all the general interest humor up front, since this is what people would see if they downloaded a sample. Now, I had to decide where and how to publish it. I'll talk about that in the next entry.

Here's more about the book itself: It seemed Funny at the Time.

eGads, eClept, eWillickers -- I made an eBook!

The Laugh's on Me

Did you know that HMO is a contraction of "Hey, Moe!" inspired by the Stooge-like nature of health care, or that divination by means of gum wrappers in the foot well of your car is called "Auto-Tridenotomancy"?

Are you smart enough to avoid buying beluga cadaviar or a house with a skeptic tank?

Would you be tempted to visit the Samuel Addmas Family Brewpub or read a scatological children's book called The Outhouse at Pooh Corner?

If any of this made you laugh, grin, or smirk, you're in for a treat. I've gathered my best humor pieces from the past fifteen years, tossed in the funniest excerpts from my talks, and put everything in one volume. Along with scads of humor aimed at a broad audience, there are special sections for computer geeks, writers, librarians, teachers, and fans of young-adult novels. Check it out. There's a lot to enjoy.

Get it for the NOOK at Barnes & Noble.
Get if for the Kindle at Amazon.com

Other formats coming soon.

A thoughtless moment

This is going to be quick and messy, because I have work to do, but I need to make a post.  (Normally, I strive to make anything I put online as clean as a published manuscript, because I think writers should not walk around in their underwear in public, but this is for a good cause, so let the typos fly.)

Saturday, I was on a panel at Rutgers One on One.  I usually do a decent job on these things, but I blew it with one question.  I was asked, "How do you show thoughts in fiction?"

My first reply was, "Italics," followed by a pause. (I'm all about timing.)  Then, I gave a bit more of an answer, some of which was okay, but most of which was not all that good.  I really did't give the person the answer he or she (questions were submitted ahead of time) deserved.  I think this was, in part, because the question required a bit of thought before I could really assemble my answer into something useful, and in part because there were five people on hte panel, and I didn't want to talk for too long.  But I can jabber as much as I want in this space.  So, while I won't address the entire topic, I hope I can at least come closer to providing something that might be a useful response.

In first person, you can show thoughts just like you show dialogue, in a variety of ways.

That martini might be poisonous, I thought.
I had a thought.  The martini might be poisonous.
A thought stopped me cold.  The martini might be poisonous.
A thought stopped me cold.  It might be poisonous.
(Note that the use of "it" makes this much more obviously an exact thought as opposed to something being related or described.  This is a good place for italics.)

There are endless ways to do this.  As always, the key is to find the phrasing that fits all the structure and needs of ther passage.  Terse, elaborate, frantic, sedate, whatever. 

In third person, it's pretty much the same, with tiny differences.

That martini might be poisonous, John thought.
John had a thought.  The martini might be poisonous.
A thought stopped John cold.  The martini might be poisonous.
A thought stopped John cold as he eyed the martini.  It might be poisonous.
(Note the addition of "martini" in the last example, to help anchor the pronoun.

Okay -- that's just a glancing blow at the topic, but it's definitley a much better job than my reply at the conference. 

Reference section

Teachers/librarians -- I was asked for a reference. If I visited your school, and can use you as a reference, let me know. Thanks.

[Update -- got what I needed. Thanks.]

Message in a bottleneck

A young writer, Joe Wilkins, sent me a question as a LiveJournal message (by way of Facebook). I wrote a response, but when I tried to send it, I found I couldn't because of his privacy settings. I'm all in favor of young people being cautious online and using any available privacy screening and protection. But, unless he sees this post, he'll think I ignored his message. I even tried to friend him on Facebook, so I could respond, but there didn't seem to be any way to do it. Joe -- if you see this, send me an email. You can find my address at the bottom of the main page of my web site.

Rumors of my dearth have been greatly exaggerated

I recently mentioned that I've been blogging a lot less now that I've started using Twitter. This is not to imply that I won't be blogging at all. I should assure the five or six of you who read this that I do have some things to say that don't fit neatly into 140 characters. I've just been amazingly lazy. It's scary to realize I've even been too lazy to spend time with my favorite method of procrastination. But the lazy days of summer are being washed away by the rain. I'll be back.

You can't beat a hasty retweet

Ever since I started using Twitter, I've been blogging a lot less. I guess most of what I have to say is fairly concise. Including this.