eBook Publishing: Easy as 1, 2, 3...

Three days, that is! I totally get why people pay other people to do the whole formatting and conversion for eBooks, even though it's completely free to do it yourself.

The Amazon process took a second and a half and was pretty fantastic. The only trouble was that there was some mysterious hidden formatting that was impossible to fix. There are about three pages that are completely one half inch indented (and not just the first line of each paragraph). Bah-humbug.

Smashwords. Don't even get me started. Still waiting on conversion. When I went to bed last night I was #765 in line and now I'm down to #38. So another hour and I'll find out about all the formatting mistakes I made so I can start over again.

Quick tip for teens: Do Amazon first so you can see immediately how things convert and what basic formatting adjustments need to be made. Then move on to Smashwords, which requires more adjustments. Smashwords, for instance, suggests removing all tabs whereas Amazon can read them fine.

Once things work out, I'll post a link here for the deleted chapters. They cover the time leading up to the events chronicled in Lost Edens and might be interesting for readers. Or they might have been a really good lesson to me to let the publisher deal with the conversion of the full length!