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Swallow The Moon
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KDP Select - a 2nd Run
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This is not quite true. Send the file to your name@free.kindle.com, get back an AZW, load it into your Kindle, see the glitches. But you're right in that you can't see them in MSWord itself, only their effects on the Kindle as paragraphs spaced off from the left, all lines indented.
For one story, I took the text from Word, pasted it into Scrivener, saved it, put it back in Word, and all the glitches were gone. When I tried that same approach with another story, it didn't work. The glitches remained (odd ball spacing). I didn't have it in me to go through and nuke the @*!$*^! thing because of three or four odd spaces so I let it go. I'd love to know why Word is so evil. Does Bill Gates hate me?
When Philpin and I exchange files when working on the same project, Microsoft takes great pleasure in inserting invisible formatting into our work the two files wage war on each other, but secretly, out of sight.
Fix the problem in Scrivener and it will stay fixed in Word.
Wanted to announce that I'm putting 'Swallow the Moon' back on 'free' as of tonight at 4am, EST.I'm hoping to get a couple hundred downloads this Saturday - more next Saturday and on Valentine's Day.
I haven't had any sales in a couple of weeks. We'll see if Kindle Select will earn it's keep this weekend.
Finger's Crossed - would also appreciate some tweets if possible.
I'm @KatJordan1 on twitter./
My latest run was a big flop. And then today I had a return on a book which put me at -1 sale for the month on that title (none had sold in Feb.).
Good luck with it, Kat. I hope Amazon has ironed out its glitches before you get on. I can tell you that giving away books and not knowing how many you're giving/have given away isn't half as much fun as watching those numbers tick over. Selling books afterwards with the rankings not working properly isn't much fun either.But the sales! Ah, the sales! :)
On Feb 1st, the reporting system malfunctioned, so it wasn't recording sales (though I've heard that they do have the information somewhere and it will come through eventually). Then yesterday, the rankings on Amazon US were visible, then invisible, with alarming regularity. I'm still not sure it's entirely fixed as my sales don't seem to be making a lot of difference to my rankings today.
The sales are always gone at the start of a new month. I had sales on the 1st that showed up on the 1st.The rankings have been coming and going for quite a while now. I remember that happening off and on since at least December. I wrote an email to KDP about it and got some canned response.
Patricia wrote: "The sales are always gone at the start of a new month. I had sales on the 1st that showed up on the 1st.The rankings have been coming and going for quite a while now. I remember that happening of..."
Some people got their sales reports as normal, but when your rank shows you at #113 on Free Kindle and your report says you've given away 26 books, there's definitely something out of whack. Apparently it depended on which 'cloud' your books were on. I can't pretend to know what that means.
Amazon has lots of servers that don't always keep up with each other. I had a good ranking in my recent giveaway, but almost no copies were downloaded. I just figured the free books weren't being scooped up this time around. So you think the downloads just weren't counted, or at least sent through in the reports?I wish Amazon would add another column to the reports showing freebies separately. Lumping them with purchases makes it difficult to know where you stand.
Well, we are off and running. 11 copies of 'Swallow the Moon' out in the US.
Already hit the #31 spot in Free Romantic Suspense in the UK.
Any 'love' in the form of tweets would be appreciated.
Mod
Get SWALLOW THE MOON #FREE while you can. No 31 in #Romantic #Suspense. @KatJordan1 http://www.amazon.com/Swallow-the-Moo...
Sorry - they were on a different thread.
Mod
I found out my Word program was corrupt but I no longer had the disk to reload it. I bought Office 2010 and have a whole new animal loaded into my computer now. Seems to be much better, but not as easy to use as I learn my way around the program. I'd like to be able to remove the features I'll never use. The one thing I really miss is the spell check button. You need to have all the "check" buttons in proofing activated when you write which results in underlined warnings as you go along. I hate that. Disrupting. I want to check a doc at the end of each writing session. Many times my "mistakes" aren't mistakes, otherwise I wouldn't mind 2010's methods so much.
Mod
First thing I noticed is that the quick fix of sending Word files through Pages no longer works. That business where Word gives whole paragraphs a left indent, previously fixed by running the file through Pages, is back, and there is no fix except to nuke the file, and that doesn't always work, whereas Pages was a certain cure.
I'm thinking seriously of going over to Pages for all my work, and dumping Word, despite having a 30-year investment in Word, from before the time when Microsoft bought it..
I've had enough of Microsoft's incompetence.
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Don't even bother suggesting Scrivener. I don't want or need another gimmick-laden one donkey of an app. A word processor should be simple and fast.
Wouldn't it be nice to just pick and choose from a menu of features, then keep it as simple as possible? The menus are cumbersome. I already have scrivener but haven't taken time to learn it.I have found it easier to control Word's indents on 2010 than on my old 2003. I don't even know what docx is. Is that just on Macs?
No Docx is a strange hybred of HTML and word processing document.
Mod
RE: SelectIt's weird. Some people it's working great for. I had several friends who did it last week to great success.
I'm very leery of it, but am going to try the old college try across all platforms for a few months before I mess with it.
I think it is hit or miss - I keep missing. LOL
Definitely hit and miss and it doesn't even seem to be timing that affects it. I finally got the figures for the three books I gave away on Feb 1st. Two of them a quite disappointing, but in 24 hours, Mark of the Dragon Queen was downloaded over 1900 times from Amazon US. That, to me, is incredible. More than twice what it gave away in the last giveaway which was over two days.
That's great...for MotDQ - This appears to be an incredably slow process. I'm watching your rankings, Andre`s and Dakota's.I actually got a couple sales this week, and a borrow.
"Swallow the Moon" goes free again on Saturday. There is only 1 day left. We'll see what happens this week.
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The proper way is to nuke the format and start over with plain text. But sometimes the Microsoft gremlins survive even that desperate measure.
Then (or if you're just lazy and want a shortcut) what works is to run your MS DOC file through another word processor, or a Word clone, that has two characteristics:
1. It must export a DOC format file. Obviously, because that's what you want to send to KDP.
2. It must strip off the Microsoft crud. They all do, as far as I know.
I use Apple's Pages. The procedure is to take my MSWord DOC file, open it in Pages, export it as a DOC, then send it straight to KDP *without opening it in MSWord again*. It takes less than a minute. Works a treat. All the books I've worked on in the last year have been complimented for the beauty of their setting. You can test whether the process works with your chosen other WP by sending the DOC file you export from Pages or X to your name@free.Kindle.com and loading the AZW file that Amazon returns into your Kindle.