Mary Sisson's Blog, page 138

You can tell when someone is honest because they don't lie to you

This are two good posts about Penguin's self-pubbing service, called Book Country (the second post is titled "Sucker Country," hee). If you read them together, you'll see that Penguin is engaged in a delicate balancing act. It has to imply (but not promise) to newbie writers that they are going to be published by Penguin! OMG!! This is the major leagues!!! At the same time, it has to make sure that Book Country is legally separate, otherwise the authors Penguin publishes and their organizations will say, Oh, Penguin is now just a sleazy scam of a press, I shall take my business elsewhere!

I assume something similar happens when someone hangs up a sign that says "digital publisher" and asks for $3,000 or half your royalties to do more or less what I spent part of an afternoon doing last Friday. They say, Oh, but I'm a PUBLISHER! I'll PUBLISH your book, and then you'll be PUBLISHED!! and the writers, zombie-like, reach for their wallets.

Here's a reality check: It's the pricing schedule for Book Baby, which will produce an e-book for you (and design your cover) if you pay them. I haven't used them, but I know people who have and were happy with the work. More important: File conversion (complete with table of contents!) and distribution is $99, plus a $19 annual fee after the first year. The most-expensive "deluxe" cover design is $279.

Total technophobe? Afraid to do a cover? Don't even want to try doing it yourself? Fine--there's your price range.

When people start asking for five or ten or thirty times that amount of money, you need to become DEEPLY skeptical. They are NOT five or ten or thirty times better. Remember, experienced professionals typically charge you less because they are more efficient and can handle a large volume of work.

And nobody--NOBODY--can promise your book will become a best-seller. NO. BODY. The people who say that they can make that happen are lying to you. The people who hint that they can make that happen are misleading you. The people who want all your money to make that happen...run Penguin. It's sad.

See? See?

The Passive Voice featured this post by a person in charge of digitizing a publishers backlist. The highlight for me?

"When it comes to the actual conversion I honestly thought that if you sent someone the inDesign or PDF of the book then the eBook you got back would be relatively clean, but sadly that's rarely the case so you need internal resources to check the eBook thoroughly (if you want to produce good eBooks)."

 

See? Even the publishing houses have to check the books after they are converted. So must you!

Progress report

I did chapters 5 through 8 today. Holiday craziness is upon me, though--yesterday was pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving, which is apparently a thing now. I'm actually glad I have something I can stop and start and work on in what random spare time comes my way....

Progress report

I made the changes to the front matter and first four chapter--oh, I have forgotten what a joy layout is. Especially when laying out material in Word, where you close the file, open it again, and the lines are in completely different places than they were before. No, Word will not let you move them back. I hate you, Word.

Updated the DIY Publishing thingy

I updated my little sheet on DIY publishing to reflect my discovery of Calibre (which I'm sure has been around forever--I'm slow, OK?) and the other recent changes in e-books. Maybe it will be good for another couple of months....

Oh, and I'm doing a giveaway!

Yeah, I suck at marketing, don't I? I'm doing a giveaway and not telling anyone about it--it's, er, um, stealth marketing, that's what it is! It's all part of my carefully-conceived master plan....

Anyway, the LibraryThing giveaway is here--scroll down a little, they list by number of copies being given away. Which explains why people give away so many copies. I'm so naive that I just looked at the top couple of listings, thought, "Seems like people are giving away about 500 copies" and put down 500. We'll see how I feel about that number when time comes to fulfill the requests.....

I should go Tweet about this. I know there are people who scan Twitter looking for "free" and "giveaway"--I wonder how many of them won't bother to read the description and will miss the language advisory. I look forward to many, many one-star reviews saying, "This book has the word 'fuck' in it!"

Calibre works

OK, I input the rest of the proofreader's changes, did a couple of things I caught, and then uploaded the Word file to Smashwords.

Then, I tried that Smashwords hack. No dice--it did not work at all. I couldn't even read it with Adobe Digital Editions. I'm guessing that there's some kind of information in an ePub file so that if you open it up and change something, the whole thing won't work (unless, I assume, you have magickal hacking powers (hackigal powers?), which I sorely lack).

So, I went on to Calibre, which is designed for e-book readers, not so much e-book authors. It converts from e-book format to e-book format--which means that you can't convert a Word file into anything.

You can, however, convert an HTML file. I turned the Word file into an HTML. The Word file had a picture of the cover in it, and that stayed, eventually becoming the interior cover in an ePub file that had eluded me for so long.

While I had the HTML file, I gave it a clickable table of contents (which went much faster this time). Then, using Calibre, I converted it to an ePub file, looking it over with Adobe Digital Editions before I uploaded it to Amazon and B&N.

The result is a much cleaner look to the book. For whatever reason, before when I had a new chapter, it would just start a couple of lines down from where the previous chapter ended. Now it is clearly a new page. And the breaks within the chapters look discrete without the ornaments (although I kept them in the Smashwords version because they output into so very many different formats).

Is it 100% error free? I don't think so, but of course I'm having to judge from the preview tools, which are less reliable than one might like. In the Kindle version, some of the text was not justified on the right side (although most of it was). And something's a little screwy with the interior cover: If you look at it using Adobe Digital Editions, it's fatter than it should be. With the Kindle preview tool, the first page is blank, and then there's the interior cover. With the Nook preview tool, you have two interior cover images. I'm not sure what to make of all that.

Still, it's definitely better than it was before. I may noodle with it a little more tomorrow and see what I can do. But not today....

This is what a real proofread is like

Seriously, I'd almost forgotten. Among many, many, many other things, this guy caught:

"rouge" for "rogue"

"Five-Eights" for "Five-Eighths"

"Philip" and (get this) "Philipe" for "Philippe"

This is off a hard copy--he's not spell-checking anything. It's just an amazing level of detail-orientation. No offense to the people who think I'm a good proofreader, but I am just nowhere near this league.

Progress report (the ugh, my eyes! edition)

So, I input about half the proofreader's corrections into the Smashwords edition of Trang. Boy, if ever I was wondering why I never went into copy-editing--the focus on detail is just insane. Very, very, VERY useful and appreciated of course, but inputting it all...ugh. I'm hoping my eyes will uncross eventually.

I'm not going to be able to get around doing it twice, either--once for the e-book and once for the printed book. I am, however, extremely motivated to not have to do it again for the Kindle and again for the Nook. I'm going to try the Smashwords hack, and if that doesn't work I'll download and figure out Calibre, a (free, and apparently pretty much the standard) program that converts files into ePub (and that will hopefully allow me to include an interior cover).

If neither approach works, I'll just convert the Word file into HTML and take it from there.

Yeah, that's pretty much what it's like--except, what's that? You get up at 5 a.m.?

This is a hilarious spoof of the better-known self-pubbing blogs. It's really, really funny. (Unless you don't read those blogs, in which case it's probably just going to confuse you.)