Quality Control in Self-Publishing E-Books

Quality control in publishing is extremely important, and there are some nightmarish aspects to it. It really doesn't matter whether it's a print on demand paperback, an e-book or a small print run at a custom printer. Anything involving quality control at this end of the spectrum can be scaled up for a bigger operation. Otherwise the information would hardly be valid.

Yesterday, I decided to publish 'Selected Poems' on Amazon, which is a Kindle version. Their preferred file upload is an html file.

What I did was to get the original file, which is a .doc file for uploading onto the Smashwords platform. Then I changed the front matter, which is only polite to both Amazon and Smashwords, and uploaded the file as a saved html version. There is a process where you fill out all the information for the book, and of course quality control is important--typos are kind of 'verboten,' and that's fine.

After uploading the file, I first checked the book in the preview feature, and things didn't look good. Then I clicked on the 'download file' button and brought a Kindle version (so far unpublished) onto my desktop. Clicking on that, which opens up in a Kindle 'Whispersync' sort of interface, I found that every poem seemed to be set in about three to five spaces from the left-hand margin, and there were no spaces between the end of one poem and the next title, and then no space between the title and the text of the poem.

There are plenty of irritants available to the average writer in the course of a busy day, and this was one of them days! So the thing was parked in 'draft' mode for a while.

Then of course I thought of the versions, all frickin' eight or nine of them available on Smashwords...

We all know the obvious thing to do, right?

Right. I went to Smashwords, and unpublished the thing as a precaution. It's Read An E-Book Week, March 4-12 on Smashwords. The thing is marked for free, and a couple of people have been kind enough to download a book. A few people have sampled the book.

Much to my surprise, the thing looks fine in all formats, bearing in mind once 'unpublished' I can't check out the online viewing options. However, the Kindle version looks very good in my Mobipocket Reader, which I also keep on the desktop. It is a free download, and it has its limitations.

So, either the html upload simply failed on Amazon, in which case I should try again, or it is barely possible that I accidentally uploaded the .doc file, which doesn't seem very likely as I made the html file right on the spot for that sole purpose. That would tend to explain the wonky formatting though.

On the bright side, I guess I have learned quite a bit--for example, the Palm and LRF versions can be read on Mobipocket as well, although they have a strange 'AE' thingy with some curves that look distincly foreign. This is probably an idiosyncracy of Mobipocket Reader, which is only meant to simulate certain devices. It doesn't replace them. I check every page, and for good reason. Mistakes kind of hurt the ego.

The irritation has gone away, and so has the sort of self-flagellation that goes with really pooching it badly...which apparently I didn't do. This is why I always download the Epub and Kindle versions as soon as I publish anything on Smashwords.

As to what exactly the problem is on Amazon, that one falls under the 'trouble-shooting' category.

Having unpublished the book on Smashwords, the product requires re-submission even though it's the same file, and it sets it back in the Premium Distribution Catalog process, but I would rather be sure about it and not have to worry.

Other than the fact it is not published on Amazon, no serious harm has been done and it was probably a valuable exercise.

Just for the record, Smashwords' Meatgrinder and Auto-Vetter do not catch all errors in formatting, and neither do the human reviewers on virtually any platform, although I'm sure most of them are very good, 'statistically speaking.'

In other notes, I have ordered a proof copy of 'Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery' from Createspace and expect it to arrive about March 22. Only after proofing it does Createspace allow the book to be marketed. I will be using the two free distribution channels. You can get three more for about $25.00 but it's not vital at this point in time. The reader's circumstances may be different.

That book is a 6 x 9 paperback, 216 pages, and retailing for $8.99 plus S & H. This same product is marked at $10.99 on Lulu, due to the terms of service and various other factors including their pricing policies.

Plot: the last ten percent is the hardest.

I've just reached the point in writing my eighth novel, 'On the Nature of the Gods,' where it starts to get really hard.

The last ten percent is the hardest in terms of logic and persuasion. It is vital to weave together the threads of the narrative, and take all the characters that were developed separately in early chapters and bring them together in a climactic solution to the problems set them by the narrative. All of these people have been brought to this point, at this particular place and time, under this particular set of circumstances. No matter how ribald and absurd, it must have sufficent logic to satisfy the reader. They have to be able to follow along.

This is where control comes in, and how we end up with a wedding or something.

Oh, yeah, baby. This is defintely the climax of the book!

I slow right down. I daydream a lot. And yet at the same time, my mental gatekeeping is a lot better than it was two or three years ago. I don't write anything I don't have to. While the attitude may be different if an author was shooting for a 100,000 word manuscript, what I am doing now, is finishing the plot.

I want to get to the end of the plot.

I'm shooting for 60,000 words, which is all it takes to call it a 'novel.'

If someone asked you for an estimate for 32,000 square feet of drywall board, would you offer them an estimate for 45,000 square feet and a microwave oven? If someone wanted a 2,500 square-foot roof done, would you ask your crew to put a few shingles on the house next door while they were at it?

("Not I," said the cat.)

What I need to do is to hit the end of my plot at about 60,000 words. At this point, 59,990 would be okay too, as the next step is re-writing, and that's when a lot of detail will be added in. This novel has no need to go over 70,000 words.

This is a comedy. It's not 'War and Peace.'

This is where we earn the big bucks, because from this point on, is where most manuscripts fail. This is where most beginning authors fail--they get 90 % of a book done. Then they start to worry about what other people think if they don't get it exactly right. This is why the wedding is so important--the book wouldn't get done otherwise.

Somehow we have to get the people to the wedding, and the only way we can do it is to write them there...getting people to where they must be on time is like planning a wedding, or anything else involving time, motion, and space, from multiple points of view.

That's why I don't want to write too much. It makes my job a lot simpler. My head only has so much capacity.

It's not nececesary to write about a wedding with three hundred guests. Too much happened, there are too many stories and too many perspectives. This particular story, 'On the Nature of the Gods,' has maybe twenty characters, and I only introduce a crowd, 'people walking down a street,' or 'people at a wedding,' if I really need it.

Excerpt: 'On the Nature of the Gods,' a steampunk weird western.

The following is a scene from what is clearly a very silly book indeed.


After a confab with the equine members of the party, the two men and Hope went back into the hotel. There were a few bleary-eyed patrons in the wide expanse of barroom, but the piano player was slumped across the keys in an alcohol-induced comatose condition. The bartender was nowhere to be seen and Hope wondered if he was asleep on the floor behind the bar. Either that or out in the privy abusing himself, she thought. Gripping the handrail tightly as they made their way up the narrow stairs, she longed for sleep, the last refuge of the truly unhappy.

Her room was first on the right, and she pointedly slammed the door upon entry.

She flung her clothes off, not caring where they landed, and slumped into her lumpy bed, a straw tick of about two and half inches thick, very itchy as all the ones out here were stuffed with bad hay and pinon nuts.

While there was still the distant rumble of talk from below, for the most part silence reigned, and she was just so grateful, no matter how bad the bed. It lasted all of thirty seconds.

A drumming came from the ceiling above. A few seconds later, it came again. After all they had been through! Her first wonder was if someone was trying to get her attention, perhaps in some kind of emergency. Maybe they had fallen and couldn’t get up or something like that.

There was another drumming, a thudding of something hard, and resonant, but of course the floor was just planks. She knew the sounding board of a piano was spruce, right? It made sense.

She knew she would never sleep with all that ruckus going on.

Grinding her teeth, for they had been days passing the Unpainted Desert, a raw, untamed wilderness of gypsum and silica sand, and that damned racket came again. It was all white, hence the name.

“Oh, God, am I tired,” she said aloud in sheer resentment.

Hopefully the idiot could take a hint.

She made a similar observation, only louder this time.

Was it a reporter? Or was it some pimply-faced wannabe pulp fiction author, pounding away at his tripe-writer? Poor fellow! She had some empathy for all of the losers in the galaxy, but she had been averaging three and half hours of sleep per night for about the last ten days or so. The thought that a genetically-modified hammerhead diamondback rattler would sneak under the blankets and then try to crawl up into her puss-puss had kept her tossing and turning all night.

Hopefully, they were a little more scarce here in town, rinky-dink as it was. For some reason it just creeped her out.

Thuds, thuds, thuds…more thuds.

Hope reached under her pillow, and pulled out a 7.63 millimetre German-made Mauser pistol, a long and awkward thing, but deadly enough at close range, and shouted up at the ceiling. She had a spare clip or two under there as well. It was the Turkish export version, given to her as a gift by a love-crazed firearms aficionado. She’d had it anodized a pretty royal blue at a little shop in Greenwich Village. The guy lived at home with his mother and after a while the thing clearly wasn’t going anywhere…

“Let a lady get some sleep down here,” she called in the most commanding voice that a shy, half-naked young mere slip of a woman lying in a bed could generate.

Like the pitter-patter of mules getting at ‘er on a hot tin roof, the danged pounding and stomping came again, with the soft moonlight through the windows illuminating her high cheekbones and wide, sensitive mouth. But her eyes were hard and her lips set tight and firm, like concrete.

Hope emptied the magazine, spraying it back and forth, up and down, carefully peppering the ceiling surface above her with little round black holes. Quickly changing clips, she completed the cross-wise sweep. A cloud of pale smoke hung in the air, her ears rang with the concussion, and a thin haze of dust fell slowly down from above. The thuds and jumps seemed different now, more uneven…something crashed into the far wall up there, and then hit the floor with a resounding thud.

Her door smashed open, hitting the wall with a hurried crash and Rufe stood there with a wild look in his eyes.

“No! No, Hope, no!”

“What?” she asked. “I’m tired Rufe, not now, okay?”

“That’s Michael Flatus up there,” he hissed, tip-toeing up to her bedside and gently prying the gleaming blue weapon from her reluctant hand, although it was empty now anyway.

“Who? What?” she gasped.

“Yes!” he assured her. “Michael Flatus, the Broadway star, and a headliner in Danse of the Mucky Old Creeks.”

“That one was off Broadway, so far off Broadway you could say it was in the Bowery,” she noted doubtfully.

“I don’t care if it was Staten Island! He’s frickin’ famous,” Rufe stuttered.

It was quiet up there now. Blood dripped out of some holes over by the corner of the room.

Jaw hanging, eyeballs bulging, Rufe turned and stared at the ever-widening pool of blood in the corner.

“Now, if you don’t mind, sir, I would like to get some sleep,” said Hope, and with firm resolve, she turned over on her side, pulled the blankets up under her chin and closed her eyes.

“But…but…” he stammered.

“They’ll never hang a good-looking woman, Rufe,” she said without opening her eyes.

He thought about it for a moment. This was the woman he loved, and would, forever-more.

There was the sound of cautious footsteps, and then her door closed. She popped her eyes open, craned her neck, and made sure Rufe had really left the room. She leaned over, and checked under the bed. Then a very tired Hope Ng put her head down for good that night. She was snoring in ladylike fashion all of three minutes later, with visions of dumping magazine after magazine of 7.63 ball ammunition into carnival shooting galleries chock-full of sugar-plum fairies dancing in her head. She’d never actually fired the thing before. It was a really nice gun, when you got right down to it, even in that daze-like state between wakefulness and downright dreaming.

'On the Nature of the Gods' is available on iTunes in the iBookstore.

POD Cover and notes.

Above: A simple book cover using stock CreateSpace options.


So far, I have the interior file pretty much ready to go, but there are still questions and issues regarding this project.

First of all, the best I can do so far is to have page numbers centred at the bottom of each page. I would have preferred right and left, mirrored.

Secondly, because the headers and footers appear to be linked in Microsoft Word, I only have the title at the top of each page, rather than the title on one page and the author name on the other. That doesn't look too professional. When I try fix that, one set of page numbers disappears, either odd or even.

Third, this is going to cost me $25.00 for each title I upload, and after fifteen years on disability, living at about 2/3 of the poverty line, (or $7,000 under, whichever is more clear to the reader,) I don't know how fast I can go on this.

That being said, I might be able to do one a month.

I haven't calculated the retail price of the product yet, but if I set it to earn $2.00 clear profit per sale, I have to sell thirteen books to cover the cost.

Finally, if CreateSpace is anything like the parent company Amazon, they have 'thresholds' authors have to meet before they will cut a cheque, and as a Canadian, it is virtually impossible to open a U.S. bank account without going to the U.S. and doing it in person. And, since I don't have a birth certificate, nor a passport, this brings up other costs, including time spent and administrative delays on the part of the government. It's $25.00 for the birth certificate and $80.00 for the passport. Also, getting a birth certificate involves a 'garantor.' Just who in the hell is going to do that for me is a bit of a mystery at this point, as you can't use relatives and they are asking for 'persons of standing' in the community, i.e. a member of parliament, a judge, a cop, whatever--just the sort of people I hate to ask for anything. The reader's experience may vary.

So I don't know what to think about that, but I'm obviously not going to do this if there is no chance in hell of ever making any money at it--and for reasons unknown Amazon and probably CreateSpace don't deal with PayPal. The threshold for EFT on Amazon is $10.00 accrued in one month, and it's $100.00 for a paper cheque to be issued.

That sounds simple enough, but what is implied there is not. If I'm not mistaken, as I often am, 90 % of the authors on Amazon will never meet that $100.00 threshold, but then U.S. authors can just use their local bank and get Electronic Funds Transfers. If I'm the first guy to figure that one out we'll call it a 'scoop' but I'll bet the company knows that very well. What's really interesting is that they don't use the in-house AmazonPay either. I could speculate as to why this should be so, but I won't. Not yet. It might have something to do with the razor-thin margins and the fact that they are trying to take over the world...right? That's hard to do on a budget. The way I see it, if they take over the world, fine, do a good job of it--and make sure I get my piece of the action.

Tens of thousands of authors around the world will probably never figure that one out, but I like to ask a 'bleep' of a lot of questions, and I guess we'll just leave it at that.

Formatting a POD in Open Office

In between bouts of writing my new novel 'On the Nature of the Gods,' I've been spending a little time working on the POD (print on demand) version of 'Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery.'

If I can get it to work, it will be a 6 x 9 trade paperback of about 230 pages. According to CreateSpace, that opens up the most distribution channels. Sounds simple enough.

It's a little bit frustrating, because while I did it before, with the 4 x 7 'The Case of the Curious Killers,' (see below, right side,) the learning curve is still there. That's because I did that POD at least a year ago, maybe even longer. I also did 'Core Values,' but never published it, as there was a heavy dotted line running through a page in chapter three. I could never get it out without totally reformatting. I lost heart or something at that point.

Those books have mirrored pages with left and right numbering on the bottom of the page. Theroetically, the header can have left and right pages too--author name on one side, title on the other. It's a nice-looking, professional thing, and that's what I want, right?

So far I'm still having trouble getting Open Office to do that with this project. I've read a couple of tutorials and followed up with a few threads attempting to trouble-shoot the problem. Basically, it's difficult if not impossible to do it in Microsoft Word. And if you click and drag a .doc file into Open Office it clashes and maybe you just can't do it.

I still have ideas, not least of which is to read a few more tutorials. Also, somewhere in the back of my mind a voice is saying that I saved the link from the tutorial that I read a year ago, the one that helped me to succeed that time. So I might have a dig through the files for that one.

Then there is always the nuclear option: take the .doc file and save it as a .txt document, and bring it into Open Office that way. Then there's no clash with Word, although the whole file has to be formatted from scratch. Maybe I could have taken better notes last time...

The reason I didn't use CreateSpace's basic template is that it only had ten chapters, and the page numbering is centred, and I couldn't find a way to change it.

When I tried to paste another template at the end of the template, it just wouldn't go, and my book has twenty-seven or so chapters.

One way or another, it might take a couple of weeks to find the time and figure things out, and then there is the whole wraparound cover challenge--just looking at that template makes my head spin for some reason.

There are times when I wish I was in a position to throw a little money at a problem, but I'm not. I don't know about you guys, but I got a funny feeling that's either never going to happen or it is slated by an indifferent fate for some time in the far-off future.

I'm sure I'm capable of re-learning a new trick, and I guess I have nothing better to do. The most serious thing is that I really haven't written anything today.

My new e-book has a deadline of Mar 31, but I just got my new ISBN and things are going okay there. Then, if you really want to get technical, there's the whole question of making money out of all this...

We'll talk about that another day...um, maybe when we have something valid to report.