Ebooks and Wrecked Books...

So, if you've been keeping up with my posts on twitter or facebook, or following my blog, you'll know that I've been trying to find a way to self publish my books as ebooks. 

I took this challenge head on yesterday after lunch.  Kyle was home and I was waiting for a load of laundry to be done, so I sat at the computer and started surfing the web for ebook formatters.  That's when I stumbled upon the Kindle site.  I knew you could self publish through them, but I had never been able to find the page that told you how (you'll kindly remember my computer illiteracy).  Yesterday was my day.  It seemed simple enough.  Download the mobipocket creator, use it to reformat your manuscript, view it with the kindle previewer, and set up your account with kindle to sell the books.  Like I said, it seemed simple.

One of the options was to reformat your pdf file.  I thought perfect!  I had the pdf files that were used in the printed forms of the books, that would be perfect, right?  Wrong.  It turns out that pdfs are the harders of the hard to reformat.  Fine, I'll just resave the pdf as a text document.  That should work, right?  Wrong.   My friend mobi didn't like that either.  Well, last option, which was probably the one I should have gone with first, was to use my original doc file from microsoft office.  I download the file… and let out a stream of swears.  Son of a…  It won't even read this one.

I decided it was time to get off the computer so I wouldn't smash it to bits, because I knew I'd regret that move later on.  But, I mean, really?  What the hell!  I didn't understand what I was doing wrong!  (I honestly felt like crying).  I decided that the best thing to do was go to my parents' (we were going there for supper) and have a beer with my dad and my sisters.  A few minutes away might clear things up, right?  I told them what I'd been trying to do and as I talked, it started to make sense (Or so I thought.)  I asked my sister about it (Next to  my brother who is a computer genius, she is the next best at this stuff in the family) and she confirmed what I thought.  I use Microsoft Office 2010 which saves my files in .docx.  My friend Mobi wanted my file in .doc.   Grrrr.  Thankfully, I know how to push 'save as' and pick a different format. :)

So this morning, I got up, went to my computer and did just that.  It downloaded like a charm, reformatted like it was supposed to, and just like that, I was reading 'Crossover' as an ebook on my kindle previewer.  The only issue I have is that the pictures of the covers I have are too small and Kindle won't accept them… but I'm trying to come up with a solution.  I'd hate to have different covers for the printed books and the ebooks.  It was so easy that I repeated the process with 'Journey'.  It takes about twenty four hours for everything to get finalized through Kindle, so as of wednesday sometime, my babies will be available as ebooks on amazon. :)

Yay!

Now, you can imagine I was flying high as I pushed the reformat and save button on the 'Journey' file.  I had been feeling great for about an hour when I got a text from a friend of mine.  It said, 'I got my copy of Journey but the printing is messed up'.

AAAnnnndddd all of the air rushed out of my bubble.  What?  She sent me a pic to show me what she was talking about and sure enough, some of the pages are f'ed.  It looks like the pages were folded somehow while prining then straightened when they were bound, which caused there to be lines with no print running from the top to the bottom of the page.  Now, there I was, going through the box of books I had open here and I found three more.  The next step was to email everyone who had gotten a copy already and to see if they had the same problem.  Bah.  And tomorrow, my day will be fun filled with the chore of going through the sixty other books I have in my closet to make sure they're fine.  I've sent an email to Ray to let him know what is going on and hopefully we can get things sorted out. 

Thankfully, I still have lots of books with perfect printing and will still be mailing them out this week to the people who have sent me their orders.  Had all of the books been duds, I'd be much more panicked and probably been crying, but since there doesn't seem to be that many, I just keep thinking….

My babies are ebooks!  :D

To all of you out there, stay safe!

:)  Mireille