The e-book conversion
Okay, We are not talking religion here; we are talking about art and writing, though I suppose it is something close to religion for many creative people. Let’s talk about converting many years of very hard work writing a novel and then making it into an e-book. For me a real book is a breeze, I can design, layout and guide a book all the way through the printing process, but an e-book? To be short, my first e-book effort was a shambles, an embarrassment and a monstrous pain in the behind. For some awful reason, converting my Mac Word document into a Kindle format did not work well. There were missing words, run-on words, terrible letter spacing and I don’t even want to talk about the punctuation problems, the conversion had a mind of its own and it wasn’t anything I wanted to see on any kind of reading platform. For a proud artist and writer like me it was very hard to take.
Ever since that book came out I have been educating myself in the world of e-publishing. I have learned quite a bit since then. For one thing I have found a lot of difference in the two classes of e-books, fixed format and flow format. Fixed is just what it says, every page comes out as you designed it, like my comic books, every page is fixed and that is how you see it on the reader. Since there are many different kinds of e-readers, a novel, or word book, should be able to fit the format on any different e-reader and ‘flow’ on whatever page size it ends up on. Electronically this seems to be a difficult thing to achieve. But, after a month or so of hard work, I found a better converter program and was able to create a fairly nice, mostly problem-free manuscript that works on most e-readers, (that took another month). I have uploaded this version to Amazon and anyone who buys my book for the first time will get a fairly good readable edition. For those who bought my book in its earlier format, you might be out of luck. I have been writing to the people at Kindle Direct Publishing, (where you upload your books for sale on Amazon). They cannot make the latest, updated version of the book available to anyone who bought my first version. It seems that you have to make some major changes to the content for them to reissue it to previous purchasers. I am afraid that spacing, punctuation and missing words do not count as major problems, (though my high school English teacher would not agree). So I offer my sincere apologies for those who bought my book when it first came out. I greatly appreciate your support and interest. I promise that my second book will be much better and easier to read. It is also better written and plotted, I did learn a lot from writing that first book and I am getting better as I go along.
