Formatting for Digital is the Worst

Iris comes out in six days, but everything is basically ready to go. Right now I’m waiting for the final proof copy to arrive in the mail. It should be fine, but I just want to physically see it just to verify that everything looks alright. Once I do, that’s the final step.

There are a few things I’ve discovered over the last few days. The main thing being: formatting to digital is the most annoying thing in the world. I’ve heard from some people about how difficult it is, but I never realized just how obnoxious this process would be. Every single device requires a completely different format, yet we can only upload ONE FILE. So it has to be ONE FILE that works for like 10 different platforms. There’s Kindle platforms, Android platforms and Apple platforms. Apple seems to be the worst. Nothing looks good on the Apple stuff.

So if I build my file specifically for one platform, it looks awful on the others. So what did I do? I decided to do my best to balance it. That way it only looks sort-of-awful on all platforms instead of great on one and terrible on everything else. Does that make sense? The result: weird sizing, weird fonts and bizarre indents in strange places. That’s the closest to perfect I can get on all platforms.

So if you’re reading Iris on Kindle or iPhone or Android and you think, wow, these indents are strange. That’s why.

My advice: DON’T BUY THE DIGITAL VERSION

The paperback looks better anyway.

In other news, I had a lot of free time yesterday (a rare day off). I spent some of my time making a spontaneous commercial for the book. You can see it below:

 

Have a great day, everyone! Iris should finally be out soon. If you haven’t already done so, click “going” on the Iris Release Date event page to receive a Facebook notification when the book has been released: https://www.facebook.com/events/16395...