Christopher Ruz's Blog, page 13
May 21, 2012
From .doc to .mobi – Making a Kindle book, clean and simple
Too many people are making too many badly formatted ebooks. I see people playing with indents and setting fonts, despite one of the big draws of ebooks being the ability to set your own indents and font sizes and whatnot. I see people importing a .doc file directly into a conversion program and having a hideous mutant of a book birthed out the other end. I see books that display in fractured paragraphs, books where MSWord markups have twisted the text.
This can't go on any longer.
After ten million requests for me to explain how I turn a .doc novel into a kindle file, I thought it was time to consolidate my method into a blog post. This is so simple. Impossibly simple. Maybe even illegally simple. It gives you the cleanest, most streamlined ebook possible, and it's stupidly quick once you have a bit of practice.
Step 1: Right-click & save this template. If you turned it into a Kindle book immediately, it would appear as this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
YOUR TITLE
by YOUR NAMECopyright © YOUR NAME AND DATE
Cover artwork © ARTIST NAME
Table of Contents
* * *
USE THIS FOR ITALICS
Open the file in NOTEPAD or WORDPAD (not Word, please), fill in your name and story title in the relevant CAPITALISED SPOTS, and save. Keep the document open. You're 90% of the way there.
Step 2: Open up your story/novel/magnum opus in your editor of choice. I do all my editing in OpenOffice, but the same principle should work in Microsoft Word and equivalents. Have the story in Word and the mostly empty HTML file in Notepad side by side on your screen.
Now, in the story window, open the Find/Replace dialogue. Under More Options there may be a checkbox for Regular Expressions (or in Word, this may be called 'Wildcards'). Check it. Then, in Openoffice:
Find: $
Replace with:
In Microsoft Word:
Find: ^p
Replace with:
What this does is finds each line-break in your story/novel/shindig and adds the HTML code that gives you proper paragraphs. You may have to manually add a
on to the beginning of the very first sentence and a
on to the end of the final sentence, but otherwise things should all be pretty solid.Step 3: Copy and paste your entire story from Word/Openoffice into the .html file. It goes underneath the two
tags, directly following the Chapter 1 break. Done? Excellent.
Step 4: Not long to go now. See the Chapter 1 code enclosed inside the tags? Copy that and insert it at the beginning of each chapter. Change the chapter numbers so they're relevant, obviously. Then make sure you have enough links in your Table of Contents to link to each chapter. Again, copy/paste and change the relevant numbers as many times as necessary. Save your .html file and open it in your browser. Check that you can click from your table of contents to each chapter. If it doesn't work, you've messed something up.
Step 5: When your story is open in your browser, do you see any characters appearing as ? marks, or just blank squares? That's because HTML doesn't support a couple of characters without some advanced trickery. We don't have time for trickery. We're writers, goddamnit.
The main offenders are curly quotes, ie “ and ”. In Notepad, find a left curly quote, copy it into the Find/Replace menu, and replace them all with "straight quotes" (which is all Notepad should support.) Repeat for the right curly quotes. Finally, em-dashes (double—length—dashes) are not supported by HTML either. Replace them with regular hyphens.
What's that? You really like your curly quotes and em-dashes? Well, the relevant codes are here under the entity name column. I don't see them as necessary, though.
Finally, scene breaks. I don't know how you indicate your scene breaks, but I like to use a centered triple asterix. As such, I've included the code for that scene break at the end of the template file. It looks like this:
* * *
Replace the asterixes with whatever symbol you prefer, and use Find/Replace to copy it whereever you have a scene break.
Save your file. Flick through it again in your browser. Is everything looking good? Okay, nearly done.
Step 6: Italics are the only real pain with this method. I'm very sorry, but you're going to have to re-italise everything manually. If you've only got a couple sections of italics in your book and you know where they are, then all you need to do is add these tags around the few necessary areas:
USE THIS FOR ITALICS
But if you're dealing with a novel that features ten million instances of italics, this following method may reduce the pain. Open your original story document in Word. Save it as a HTML file - name it "horriblemess.html". Open it up in Notepad. You see that horrific mess of code? That's what so many authors use to build their ebooks. Those MONSTERS.
All you need this file for is to locate your italicised text. Search for [I], and you'll be taken through your italicised bits one by one. Back in your nice, clean .html document, find the same piece of text and add the italic span code I've provided. Don't forget to close off those span tags!
You should be pretty adept with basic HTML code by now, so jump to the end of the book and add a final Acknowledgments chapter where you thank your Mum. Delete any leftover code (eg, the two example pieces of code I provided at the end for asterixes and italics. You don't need them any more.)
All done? Phew. Save and get a drink. You've earned it.
Step 7: Open Calibre (or download it if you haven't already). Drop your lovely .html file in and click Convert. On the convert screen, make sure the output is set to .mobi for Kindle uploads, .epub for other readers. Select a relevant cover file. What else? Oh yeah, one little checkbox. On the second tab, Look & Feel, check the option to Remove Spacing Between Paragraphs (and in turn, add a small automatic indent to each paragraph).
Click convert.
Done.
You now have the cleanest ebook possible. No extraneous code, no fluff, no forced fonts or sizing, no silly indents. Load it up on your Kindle and breathe in that new-book scent. Get another drink. You're a winner.
If you'd like to see how this template works in practice, why not head to Amazon and preview a couple of my books? (hint hint). If you end up using this template and method, then why not buy one (or two?) My eyebrows hurt from all this suggestive winking, but seriously, I'll be a very happy author.
Happy writing, everyone!
* * *
Christopher Ruz is the author of several novels and novellas for Kindle. He also publishes pulpy spy thrillers under the pseudonym D. D. Marks.
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Other posts on the discipline of writing:
Why Editing on Paper Beats Editing on Screen
Why 1000 Words a Day is Easy and Quick
Daily Wordcounts, or, How to Lie to Yourself
When You Build a Character
Why Analyse Your Own Novel?
The Formation of a Novel
Plot vs Story
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May 16, 2012
Book Review: Street Dreams, by Tama Wise
Tyson Rua has more than his fair share of problems growing up in South Auckland. Working a night job to support his mother and helping bring up his two younger brothers is just the half of it. His best friend Rawiri is falling afoul of a broken home, and now Tyson's fallen in love at first sight.
Only thing is, it's another guy.
Living life on the sidelines of the local hip-hop scene, Tyson finds that to succeed in becoming a local graffiti artist or in getting the man of his dreams, he's going to have to get a whole lot more involved. And that means more problems. The least of which is the leader of the local rap crew he's found himself running with. Love, life, and hip-hop never do things by half.
Street Dreams
might be aimed at a YA audience, but it doesn't shy away from adult topics. Tyson, our hero, is up to his eyeballs in problems. His mother is working herself ragged to support their family, his best friend Rawiri is in the middle of an abusive home situation, and Tyson's own job as a dishwasher is growing more and more precarious. Most important of all is Tyson's own struggle to reconcile himself with his sexuality. As a young man of mixed islander descent, Tyson is expected to be the epitome of testosterone, knocking heads and taking names. Instead, he's fallen in love with a white hip-hop promoter who, for all Tyson knows, might not even be gay himself.
He can't tell his friends. He can't tell his family. Tyson has been thrown into a dangerous, confusing world without permission, and Street Dreams is the story of his struggle back to the surface. Will he come out in one piece? Or will his sexuality clash with the hyper-masculine culture of NZ hip hop, and leave him shattered?
As a white guy raised in an upper-middle-class family, I thought it would be difficult to relate to a gay brown guy stuck in a ramshackle lower-class society. It wasn't. Tama Wise paints Tyson's life with expert strokes, and while the YA style means a lot of the subtleties of Tyson's emotional struggle are laid out in black and white, there are also some beautiful instances where the harsh realities are left for us to infer.
...“Rawiri, bro, what are you doing there?”
“What's it look like, cuz?” came the quiet reply. “Sitting out under the stars, enjoying the night. What else?”
Tyson looked up through the row of trees that separated his house from his best friend's. The old wooden fence hadn't seen repair in years, and there was enough room to get back through towards the creek, and the trees there.
“How long you been out here?”
Rawiri shrugged his stocky shoulders. “Long enough.”
Tyson tried not to look too deeply under the hood of his friend's jacket and dug his house key out from the string around his neck...
Sleek, economical, and a punch in the gut. What else needs to be said?
There are so many other moments throughout Street Dreams that left my heart pounding. It's funny that, prior to picking up Street Dreams, I was reading a thriller packed full with explosions, murders and gunfights in the Egyptian desert that never really raised a sweat. On the other hand, Tyson's panic at having a gay magazine discovered beneath his bed (or Rawiri leafing through his sketch books and finding Tyson's doodles of naked men) left me hyperventilating. His terror was my terror.
Street Dreams also has a real autobiographical feel about it. For example, when Tyson (against his will) gets dragged to a gay club populated almost entirely by skinny white boys. Feeling like an outsider even when surrounded by other gay men, Tyson naturally gravitates towards the only other Islander in the club. After finally mustering up the courage to say hello and offer to buy the guy a drink, Tyson is told:
...“I don't do brown.”
“What?” Maybe it had been lost in the music. It was pissing Tyson off.
“I don't fuck brown guys.”
“What sort of bullshit is that?”...
You can't make that stuff up. Other moments, like when Tyson is invited out by a graffiti/breakdance crew to an abandoned industrial site to smoke pot and paint, are so vivid that I can't believe they weren't based on some measure of reality. And the pure existential agony of Tyson coming to terms with his sexuality is too cutting, too human. This novel is as true and honest as it gets.
It's not a perfect story, though. Tyson's life is filled with too many coincidences – people always show up at the worst possible times, like the whole cast of the novel is just walking back and forth between Tyson's home and the restaurant where he works. The finale is also relentless in how many terrible things pile on Tyson's shoulders at one time. Family tragedy, friendships in trouble, financial woes, relationship issues, homophobic bullying... It can feel really bleak. Then again, this is exactly why Street Dreams kept me up until 2am – I desperately needed resolution. Tyson had me in his grasp.
In conclusion, Street Dreams is excellent. Sure, it's aimed at a YA audience and written in a YA style, but the subject matter is dark and deeply affecting. When was the last time I picked up a slice-of-life YA novel that gripped me like this? Deadly, Unna? perhaps?
Tama Wise has serious talent. Keep an eye on him.
May 8, 2012
Discussing my revision process on Not Enough Words
The fantastic Merrilee Faber (multi-winner of the Ergofiction Search Term Challenge, and the woman that neatly knocked the writing crown off my head) invited me on to her blog Not Enough Words to discuss my revision process! So if you'd like to know exactly how I tore Century of Sand apart and put it back together again, click through to the post!
The first Olesia Anderson Omnibus is out… and to celebrate, a free novella!
My pulpy alter-ego D. D. Marks
just released the third novella in his Olesia Anderson thriller series (when will that man stop)? But, even more importantly, the third novella goes hand in hand with a cut-price collection of all three Olesia Anderson stories published so far!
Agent 806 is a novel-length omnibus that collects Dirty Deals, Black Market and Muzzle Flash - almost 90,000 words of gunfighting, stuff-exploding, backstabbing, international intriguing, vent-crawling, bad-boy-kissing, double-crossing adults only fiction. I'm bloody excited... no, wait. D. D. Marks is bloody excited to have it live on the Kindle store, and to celebrate, the second novella in the series (Black Market
) will be free this Wednesday and Thursday for anyone with a Kindle or Kindle-equipped device.
So, download away, enjoy some pulpy goodness, and spread the word! Also, a quick reminder... Mother's Day is on Sunday!
April 20, 2012
New short in the works: Corrosion (A Love Story)
I was on the way to Emily's house, a clutch of flowers in my hand and a stolen bottle of beer in my knapsack, when I saw the sign: knee-height, wooden, handpainted and hammered into the soil. It read, Corrosion.
I knew to stay away. Workmen had thrown up yellow warning tape around the site, but children had torn it down, left it flapping in the breeze, and now the patch of dying earth was vulnerable to any passing pedestrian. In my Mother's time, thirty years before, there would've been a police guard encircling the corrosion site, engineers throwing up walls and rebar, trying to anchor the earth. There was too much damage, now. Corrosion appeared too fast to fight. All we could do was step lightly and watch the cracks.
I went wide, crossing to the other side of the street, but I could still feel the hollowness beneath my boots. The curious echo that meant the caverns beneath the pavement were widening, spreading empty fingers, taking progressive bites from the loam. I felt the scratching of the unchildren as they skittered about their blackrock kingdom.
My shirt was stuck to my neck with sweat. The flowers were crushed in my fist. I walked fast, eyes ahead, waiting for the ground to split below me, for pale fish-scaled fingers to reach up from the soil and drag me down. It was only when I reached Emily's front door and fell into the cool of her living room that I allowed myself to cry.
April 11, 2012
Guest speaker at RMIT – more nervous than my thesis presentation.
After three weeks spent buried in Olesia Anderson #3 (now 29,000 words long, and undergoing final polishing), I've been invited back to RMIT to speak to final year Industrial Design students about life on the outside. Tomorrow at 1:30 I get to go in and talk about my ebooks, my life as an entrepreneur, and all the sleepless nights that come hand in hand with this sort of business.
Honestly, I'm crapping myself.
March 27, 2012
Century of Sand write-up on Big Shiny Robot
Bryan Young, author of the fantastic Lost at the Con
, was kind enough to let me blather on about Century of Sand
on his geek-culture blog, Big Shiny Robot.
Check it out, and also give Lost at the Con a look - it's a fast, funny mashup of Hunter. S. Thompson and pop culture that should be on every self-respecting nerd's bookshelf.
March 22, 2012
Century of Sand is live.
24 hours, and I'll have my first novel up on the Kindle store. To pass the time, check out this truly magnificent cover art, courtesy of Christopher Newman.
I couldn't be happier! Or more stressed.
EDIT - It's up!
March 20, 2012
Productivity still at max.
I did the math today and realised that I've written and published around 156,000 words of new fiction on the Kindle store since November 17th, 2011. That's new fiction - if you include all my old short stories, I've got 210,000 words up for sale. That's not including collections, by the way. 210,000 unique words. And by the end of April, that count will go up to 384,000 words.
That's a lot of words.
Oh well. Back to work!
