Troubleshooting Epubs with a View to Producing Audiobooks on Google Play. Louis Shalako.

A public domain image and a little effort. #Louis

Louis Shalako

Troubleshooting.

 

My 2,000 word short story epub, converted from a PDF, (saved from a doc), worked fine on Google Play. You have to have the epub to create the audiobook. Mushroom Magic is now live as an audiobook. All very well, but the longer story, 11,500 words, did not go. The epub was bogus or something, yet they'd both been converted by Convertio. I tried another service this morning, same shit, different day.

Opening the file, I checked the formatting line by line. (A gentleman on Fb suggested checking for hidden bookmarks). Converted again, no dice. Finally, I took the file to Lulu (dot) com, where I uploaded a docx file, (confused yet? – ed.), downloaded the resulting epub, and uploaded that to Google Play. Lulu wants a $4.99 distribution fee, which I did not pay. I have sold about three dollars on Lulu since about 2011, so my reluctance is understandable. I had also tried uploading to Smashwords’ meat-grinder, thinking if I could beat that, I’d have a clean file. Unfortunately, one of the links in the Table of Contents dropped out and clearly that wasn’t going to work. The ebook might need internal navigation, but the audiobook does not. I see on Google Play that the epub uploaded successfully, and I should be able to complete the audiobook at my leisure.

A Facebook friend was asking why I didn’t put it up on Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, Draft2Digital.

Yeah, but this is a reason—I want a good clean file before tossing that up across all available platforms, also, I have two stories, not one, in fact four if you count audio files…I’m an old man, I go pretty slow these days.

(Yeah, you're slow all right. - ed.)

And I do have my reasons. It’s a process, and I go step-by-step, thinking it through as I go along. Trust me, I will figure this shit out sooner or later. If I find a typo during this process, I only have to upload the corrected file to one platform…capiche?

While working on The Castaways, I scraped Mushroom Magic off of this very blog. It was experimental, a test-bed for the longer story. I hadn't published anything in a year, and a bit of review might be in order...right? Also, there are other stories that have not made it into the ebook, short-story list. Those all represent potential products. These are books and stories, they are products, there is nothing mystical about them. There is no room for fulminations, ruminations, bloviations about the sanctity of art. I'm too busy taking cheques to the bank, ah, figuratively speaking...

Beginning October 1, The Castaways took about eighteen days, from start to finish, and now I get a day off...

When I get a minute, I need to recover five accounts on Draft2Digital, now that they have been migrated over from Smashwords due to some sort of amalgamation of the two companies, and now, even I am beginning to get confused.

#cheap_hacks

I don’t know if this is a milestone or merely a first for me, but the cover, which admittedly, is not very good; for Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller’s new short romance and adventure story The Castaways was created using AI, artificial intelligence. I had the choice of paying $29.00 for two images from Shutterstock, only problem was that I only needed one image and I couldn’t find anything really appropriate anyways. Theoretically, each image would be $14.50, but you have to grab the second image within 30 days and why bother, if you have no idea of what you might write next, and you probably can’t find anything really appropriate anyways.

You can spend days, weeks, browsing for the perfect image and never find it.

Oh, and the enhanced license was $175.00 for one image, this for a book that likely won’t sell anything like that in the next twenty years. I have always tried to avoid vanity in publishing. It has never been about getting a handful of books into our local independent bookstore, and my once-in-a-lifetime story in a local news outlet. Local journalists and the advertisers love those kinds of stories, but then those nice folks went to a local printer, dropped a couple of grand on the table, got their hundred or so paperbacks, and learned nothing about the process.

The vast majority will do one, maybe two books, give it up as a bad job, and never get back to it again...a couple of grand isn't exactly chicken feed, and boxes of unsold books in the back of a closet tell a story of their own.

Whereas I have seized the means of production. And I have learned how to run it, too.

We had a little help from Dall-E.

***

Somehow, I just clicked on Copilot, right here on the good old desktop PC, and saw something labeled ‘create an image’. What the hell, why not, right. And it really is as quick and simple as typing in a few key words, ‘romance’, ‘young woman’, ‘tropical beach’, ‘desert island’, and the thing produces the image in jig time. It’s not the most appropriate, in terms of what I would visualize myself, but at some point you have to make the compromise and move on to the next thing. The cover of Mushroom Magic used a public domain image of a classic painting, and it’s actually very good. Go figure.

What really pisses me off, like an ant climbing up an elephant’s leg, is the fact that I can’t seem to get back there. So, I got one free image and that’s it for the time being…as for copyright, who in the hell is going to steal my book cover—why, what for, what good is it to anyone else but me. Every bit of original work in my book belongs to me, and to no one else.

Period.

Neither story is going to sell a million copies and we know that going in, so in that sense vanity, ‘the fucking ego’, can take a back seat and let the intellect do a little work for a change…these are the folks that say you have to spend money to make money—then shit all over you for trying to make some money by sheer dint of hard work and honest effort.

Idiots, as we are all aware, can justify pretty much anything. It occupies their minds and keeps them busy if nothing else.

If you look at the lower image, you can see that we are coming up on one million blog hits, a rare achievement. It’s all incremental, over fifteen years. The most recent story has, in a week or so, 19 hits. Now that, is what I call incremental—

At this point, Google owes me about $25.88 for Adsense, which is about what it’s worth on some level. I had to shut them down. I will never see a penny of that, because the ads were a distraction, with two gigantic horizontal banner ads, identical, appearing right in the middle of my fucking text…the reader will sort of imagine what that looks like, but you have to admit, it’s a pretty nice blog. I can create my own ads, for my own products, in the sidebar. What do I need their shit for? Especially as it doesn't pay. The threshold for payment is $100.00, so there you go.

Click to enlarge.

So, why do it?

Right? Why even do it…

I enjoy the work, doing the audiobooks, partly because it’s different. I can listen to a voice read the text back to me, and it really does take things to a whole new level. Hell, I've even caught a couple of typos along the way. (Louis found and fixed three typos, which he found by listening rather than reading. Ebook corrections have already been uploaded. What is interesting is just how many times he'd already read the effing book, and somehow missed those. In that sense, his process of going straight to audio has its uses. - ed.)

It is, in the sense of classic radio plays from a bygone age, Theatre of the Mind, ladies and gentlemen. And I got to write the play...

Of course I want to hear it.

When I first began self-publishing, the word ‘greedy’ was used quite a bit, in rather oblique social media posts from people that really should have known better. Whether I do this as a hobby, or for fun, I sure as hell ain’t doing it for the money, and that is for sure.

If so, I would have been terribly disappointed.

It’s also no one’s business but my own.

It’s my money, and I’m the one having all the fun here.

"Be happy in your work."

Other peoples' perceptions are not my problem.

 

END

Be happy in your work.

Radio Drama, or Theatre of the Mind. (Wikipedia)

Convertio.

Free Convert.

Mushroom Magic, by Louis Shalako.

The Castaways, by Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller.

(I will put up a link when I get that done. Ah, Saturday at the latest, ladies and gentlemen. #Louis)

 

Thank you for reading, and for listening.

Update: Louis has uploaded Mushroom Magic to Kobo using a doc file, there are several file types accepted by Kobo. Downloading the resulting epub, and checking it using Adobe reader takes but a moment and it looks fine. Theoretically, we can now take the Kobo-generated epub, or any other nice, clean file, and publish that somewhere else. As said in the text above, it is a process.

So, he still has to upload The Castaways to Kobo, and then both stories to Amazon. The thing to do is to follow through, (finish what you start), admittedly while doing at least some thinking about his next little hare-brained stunt.

And we all know he will come up with something.