(Trying to) Publish in iTunes

After I successfully published Rome's Revolution on Amazon and for the Nook, it was time to take on the iTunes store. Do you think you can just upload your book like the other two web sites. Nope. You need a Mac, which I don't have (thank you Steve!) and iTunes Producer. It took us two weekends and lots of error messages before I discovered that my books didn't pass Epubcheck which is the industry standard.

I went back and used a program called Sigil to examine the internal structure of the Epub format and discovered that Calibre was inserting some tags which were not legal. Sigil would allow me to manually remove them but I wasn't about to do that for every chapter every time I revised the manuscript. So I cheated. I wrote a program in Visual FoxPro which read in the entire HTML version, stripped out the illegal tags and then wrote it back to disk. By using the Epubcheck, I knew the next time I submitted my book to iTunes, it would pass.

One more weekend and voila, it went up. I got a rip-roaring big warning from Apple that my cover was not big enough (it was 800 x 600). However, it was just a warning so I ignored it. I wasn't planning on using that cover for the paperback anyway. Once the book went live on iTunes, it was time for Kobo. Kobo is a snap. It takes an Epub directly. Easy Peasy.

Then Smashwords. Oy. What a nightmare. Smashwords was created long before anybody had tools to create e-books directly and they were going to be the world's conduit to Amazon, B&N, etc. Their processor is called the "meatgrinder" and boy is it named correctly. It mangles your manuscript, loses fonts, etc. I finally decided to keep a Smashwords-only version of each book and whenever I make changes, I just copy and paste them onto Smashwords. I published there and had to wait several weeks to get approved as a Premium Catalog candidate. But then it was done.

I also used Smashwords to publish Future Past on iTunes because I ran out of ISBN numbers. If you let them publish your book, you get one for free.

So there you have it, Kindle, Nook, iPad, Kobo and Smashwords. I've got it down to a science now. I was able to crank out the formal e-book version of Rome's Evolution in record time. After I wrote it of course.

Tomorrow, how to (not) do a paperback.