My eBook eXperience -- part six of many

Submission time. Almost. I realized I wanted some blurbs. Two people came to mind, both of whom were influential in the humor world. One was John Scalzi. He's well known as a blogger, and an author. He was also my editor when I was selling humor to America Online. (AOL had a short-lived hidden humor feature that popped up when you clicked the logo on the front page. It was called "Howdy!" and alternated between an essay and a cartoon. They had a nice assortment of contributors, including the amazing cartoonist, Caldwell, and the writer Madeleine Begun Kane. That was back in the days when people paid for online access by the hour. So there was an incentive to keep people reading. When they changed to a monthly billing format, I knew the humor feature was doomed.) John had also given my HMO piece, which I called "Frequently Asked Questions about Health Care," the perfect title -- "HMO Phobia." I sent him an email asking if he could provide a general blurb about my humor-writing ability, and also asking permission to use the title he'd come up with for that piece. (I asked for a general quote becasue I didn't want to ask him to read the book. I know how busy he is. And I get requests for blurbs fairly often, so I know how time-consuming it can be.) He quickly responded with a nice blurb, and permission to use the title. He's a good guy.

My other request went to Joshua Malina, who starred in one of my favorite shows of all time, Sports Night. He also produces one of the funnier streams of humor on twitter (follow him as @joshmalina). We've been discussing a possible television project for a while, hampered only by the inability of the networks to realize how perfect and brilliant it is. I asked Josh for a general quote, also, since he's read a fair amount of my fiction. He was nice enough to offer to read the book. He came through wonderfully.

Okay, all set. I logged into Amazon's Kindle publishing site (KDP), and went through the submission steps. There was nothing tricky or complicated. I'd already written up my description. When the time came to upload the eBook file, it passed whatever tests they ran. I got a message telling me the book would be available withn 24 to 72 hours. Naturally, about thirty minutes later, I started checking. It actually showed up that evening. I downloaded the sample, to make sure everything looked right. It was fine. The long hours I'd spent creating the prc file myself had paid off. The bullets in the table of contents looked fine.

Barnes and Noble was next. They also had a publishing site, called "Pubit." If anything, their process was slightly easier. Again, the file passed on the first try. The book showed up that evening. I downloaded the sample, and discovered a problem. As I'd mentioned way back toward the start of this series, the Nook has separate external and internal tables of contents. As a short-cut to making my title page look nice, I'd used headers (h3 and h4 for title and author name). Whatever software Barnes and Noble uses to extract the sample of the book must look for headers to build the external table of contents. So, if you're reading the sample and pull up the table of contents, you'll find the following chapters included at the top: "It Seemed Funny at the Time," "by," and "David Lubar." I thought about redoing the title page and resubmitting, but I had done so much massaging of the file to get it into the right format, I was hesitant to take any steps backward. I figured people who downloaded the sample would just start reading, and not pull up the TOC.

Other than that, everything had gone as planned. I now had a book available for the Nook and the Kindle. It was only after I'd done all of this, and made up a page on my site for the book, that I noticed a typo in the description. I changed that in all three places. After which, I noticed the second typo. I fixed that one. I'm sure there's a third. Please don't tell me about it.

This has grown longer than I expected. I'll get to my Smashwords experience tomorrow.