Louis Shalako: Formatting

Showing posts with label Formatting. Show all posts

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Kai Zen: Overhauling My Publishing System.

A reader.

Louis Shalako

No true adventure can ever happen without sacrifice.

Nothing good in life comes easily.

You get out of it what you put into it.

***

While we talk some, we listen as well.

Having learned quite a bit, we’ve set aside April 2014 for an overhaul of our publishing system. For one thing, not all titles appeared in all stores. Looking at that brought up other questions.

One thing that needed to be addressed was our blurbs.

***

Time Storm (What I have now.)

Short blurb

Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals, which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The Company has a monopoly. The planet is uninhabited. Everyone has a secret. With a small wintering party, life's pretty boring until everything goes terribly wrong. On Althea, staying alive is half the battle.

Long Blurb

Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals, which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The Company has a monopoly, and the planet is uninhabited. McNulty dies unexpectedly and Freddie Smith is acting strangely. Everyone has a secret and it's only a small wintering party looking after the Complex. Life 's pretty boring, when everything goes terribly wrong. Mickey Greenwood and his friends must race against time to save the others, on a planet where just staying alive is half the battle.

***

That was the first pro marketing image I ever bought, yet another issue that needs to be addressed.

***

On the Nature of the Gods

(Short)

Before (And this only part of what was probably the worst blurb ever written.)

Jeb is one of the toughest men alive, and he demands respect. After a personal humiliation at the hands of the New York City cops, he sets out on a trail of vengeance. In company with his intuitive horse Rooster, it leads him to the evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff, the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome.

After

If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. Right now he’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the toughest men who ever lived, undefeated in over a hundred bare-knuckle bouts. Hope Ng, her nefarious rescuer Rufe, and the sexy mutant Miss Kitty are all under his watchful evil eye. Luckily for them, the ghost of Tecumseh takes an indulgent interest.

After that, even

If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. He’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the toughest men who ever lived, undefeated in over a hundred bare-knuckle bouts. He's also got the hots for Jeb's girlfriend, Miss Kitty. Hope Ng, her nefarious rescuer Rufe, and the sexy mutant Miss Kitty are all under his watchful, evil eye. Luckily for them, the ghost of Tecumseh takes an indulgent interest. Rife with the bizarre juxtaposition of psycho-sexual elements, On the Nature of the Gods is simply unforgettable.

***

The only rational claim we can make is that the new blurbs are somehow better than the old blurbs. What we are trying to achieve is ‘sales copy’ rather than just giving the whole plot away in the product description.

That’s not to say that they are good, and they are almost certainly not great. But they are better.

All of this has to do with passive discoverability, where a better blurb will do a better job of speaking to a customer who is browsing one online bookstore or another. Assuming that one does tweet or post a book link once in a while, a better blurb still does a better job with more active marketing.

Here’s the pain-in-the-butt aspect of all this: once we have a new blurb up on Smashwords, our job is not done. Then we get to stick it up on Amazon, and then Createspace, assuming we have paperbacks. We must also remember Google Books and OmniLit, and Kobo or Lulu, or any other platform we are using. It doesn’t stop there. Assuming we have image/link type ads on our blog, we had better update our blurbs there, and in my own case, in the past I have forgotten or even neglected my website. All those blurbs will have to be fixed up as well. Admittedly this is only copy/paste work but it has to be done and it has to be done thoroughly.

Bear in mind this author has five pen-names and seven or eight blogs. That's why I set aside a whole frickin' month.

Also, speaking in terms of continuous improvement programs, 'Kai-Zen,' a new, more professional author bio must be posted all over the place, including at the end of each book. A newer, cleaner-looking front matter design must go into all back titles.

If a Table of Contents is now required for iTunes, then old stories aren’t going to make it in. If they are already in iTunes, any kind of update can blow them out of there again as they’re one of the more stringent retailers in terms of internal review processes.

Now, imagine if you will, a universe where some guy has at least 73 English-language titles…plus a few French and one Spanish. Imagine rewriting all them frickin’ blurbs and loading them up on all channels…and going through every .doc file, trying to get them all to look nice.

In one brief note, when I clean up a file—a title, I put Apr14 in the file name, that’s April 2014. I’m using the original .doc file as downloaded from Smashwords.

The next time I go looking for something in my files, I can lay my hands on the most recent one. For all intents and purposes, virtually all other file versions can now be eliminated except POD files and anything that’s exceptional for any other reason, say an unpublished work/WIP.

***

Here’s my old front matter design, it’s kind of centered and arrowhead or diamond shaped. It was also all squashed together. The first few titles were really bad.

The Case of the Curious Killers

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

Cover art copyright by Louis Bertrand Shalako 2010

ISBN 978-0-9866871-2-9

http://shalakopublishing.weebly.com

This Smashwords Edition is published by Shalako Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased; or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.

***

Not very good, in some ways.

Now it looks more like this, bearing in mind the title is black and linkless:

The Case of the Curious Killers

Louis Shalako

Design; J. Thornton

ISBN 978-0-9866871-2-9

***

My new bio looks like this:

Louis Shalako began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines. His stories appear in publications including Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

This was the old one.

Louis Bertrand Shalako began his career writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines, such as The Delhi News-Record, Brant News, The Nanticoke Times, Ontario Tobacco Grower, and the Fire and Safety Equipment Quarterly. A notable writer of darkly humourous speculative fiction, his works have appeared in six languages. His stories appear in publications as diverse as Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. With a unique voice and gifted story-telling across genres, Louis takes the reader on a magic carpet ride and a compelling read. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

***

Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Luckily, hard work is something we understand.

No honest effort is truly wasted.

A dollar earned is a dollar earned.

It’s all about showing the reader a good time.

***

Here we is on Scribd.

Someday I really ought to consider a professional mug shot.

Oh, well.

Them’s the breaks.

***

See you laters, alligators.

And there's plenty more work where that came from.

END

Monday, March 31, 2014

Fresh Challenges.

We'll put our heads down and do the work.

Louis Shalako

Every day, and in every way, I just keep getting better and better.

That means I'm up for some fresh challenges.

The biggest challenge is to get a better computer. Step one, a large monitor, will bring immediate benefit. My eyes aren’t the best and I’m sitting way back from the screen just to see it properly. Also, it’s stand-alone. It doesn’t require new software, a keyboard, mouse or speakers.

That’s $229.00 for a 24”, 1080p, 2ms monitor. I should have that sometime in the next 3-10 business days.

I don’t care how long it takes to pay off.

We’re just going to bite the bullet, boil lots of water and tear up a lot of sheets for bandages, but by Darwin we’re going to do it.

A couple of months from now I’ll get the base unit, and of course there’s software, antivirus, Adobe Photoshop, and a long list of goodies on the wish list.

***

Shalako Publishing and Long Cool One Books have 73 titles on Google Books/Google Play. Yet there are only 65 on OmniLit, and the number varies from platform to platform.

That issue needs to be addressed.

***

My first three mystery titles have been dogging along with some pretty lame covers. Now is a good time to make some new ones, in the light of new knowledge, new skills and a bit of experience. That really can’t be put off much longer.

Some of the other covers could be upgraded, especially the early ones, using the original marketing image, which saves money. But punching up the design isn’t out of the question, even with our existing technological infrastructure.

***

My latest mystery novel, Blessed Are the Humble, still hasn’t been issued in a paperback/POD. I know I had a file made up for that, but now I can’t find it.

Such is life on the razor’s edge, ladies and gentlemen.

Creating a POD file takes maybe a couple of hours, and then there is the marketing image. I also think there is a file for Engines of Creation somewhere in a folder. I’m looking at a few hours straightening all that up.

As I go through the Createspace process, I will take a look at what is involved in using a Createspace-issued ISBN. This is a requirement for the last free distribution channel, which gets a book into Ingram’s, etc.

Once I figure out how to do that, I can maybe go back through the list and get them other books into the catalogue…capiche?

We'll see how that one goes.

***

Files. My files are a mess. I have fifteen copies of this, and nine copies of that, and some of them are in formats that I will never use or can easily create, for example .txt, .mobi, .epub, and what do I need a bunch of old versions for anyways?

Also, I can’t find a damned thing sometimes. I would like to clean out my files and put everything in a logical place. I would like all current book covers in one file, all latest versions of the .doc files in another. I would like erotica in one folder and other photographs somewhere else. Whether all of my pen-names have their own folder, or if everyone goes in the same folder, I haven’t quite decided.

***

I can only find 24 titles on iTunes. I don’t care if I have to go through fifty files, and reformat every blasted one of them.

I’ve already done quite a number of the short stories, where you have to make a table of contents that is up to iTunes’ expectations. This looks like another time-suck, but what are you going to do?

Knuckle down and do the work, even if the old epidermis crawls at times and I’m grinding my teeth and gnashing my jaws while I do it.

Argh.

***

So. Why am I writing a serial, online, publishing as I go, with people looking over my shoulder, all snarky-snark-snark? We all know what the pros are going to think about that.

Here is your answer:

I need time to do all this other crap. It slows me down and leaves me with a lot of available time, as I only need 2,000-3,000 words per episode. I only need one episode per week.

By the time I am done, I will have another first draft. That will be the first draft of my thirteenth novel.

When I have it all in one .doc, I can rewrite and revise that until I’m blue in the face, and then I will have another science-fiction novel.

***

The month of April has plenty of bad weather and I think I can get it all done.

Other than that, maybe it’s time to get some bifocals.

END

Sunday, January 5, 2014

The Hyper-Writing Learning Curve.

Savoia-Marchetti S-55, 1933. This example flew with Aeroflot in the Soviet Union. (Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

I’ve been fooling around with semi-scientific non-fiction, and so I am making an illustrated ebook hypertext.

The first time I loaded it up, the text looked fine but the pictures didn't render, and so I inquired further.

I didn’t panic, and I didn’t get upset, I didn’t even really get all that irritated. I sort of expected problems going in.

It’s a learning process, it involves experimentation and research into the basic techniques.

It requires things like making pictures smaller than 127 kb, and I also learned Kindle doesn't support > right/left html tags, etc., for photos. Pain in the butt ensues.

It might not even be a very good book. However, without some kind of book, there is no way to learn the process, and until I learn the process, I don't know what kind of book I and the system are capable of producing.

So that's day one of the New Year--we learned something, and sooner or later there will be an illustrated hypertext with my name on it.

As of January 2, it looks like the thing is ready to go. We’ll see what happens in the Kindle previewer, and take it from there, one logical step at a time until it’s complete. Having compressed the file below 5 MB, it can now be uploaded to Smashwords, Kobo, etc, wherever I want it to go.

There are other possibilities, all opened up by this one experiment. An experiment may be defined as a learning experience, or even one step in “a learning curve” as Dr. Evil would say, making his characteristic air quotes as he did so.

An illustrated ebook without a lot of links out is also very feasible. In that case, normal footnotes would apply, and yet I can’t seem to put cut-lines or photo captions in the ebook format. In that case, a POD paperback or hardcover still works in the usual fashion. Simply put, I can make illustrated books now, however unskilled the first few might eventually turn out to be, looking back from my deathbed.

Now, what that does, is to open up the possibility of writing non-fiction, with graphs, charts, cartoons, photos and illustrations, all nicely laid out and formatted on the page—and a hard copy doesn’t suffer from the same limitations in terms of rendering photos. The layout in a POD could be really nice compared to the ebook version.

Before I ever heard of ebooks, I dreamed of writing a coffee-table book, in a couple of different genres, but then I owned a couple of big books that I read from cover to cover and still treasure.

(He likes big books, and he cannot lie. – ed.)

I still keep them books around. I trashed all my notes at some point, but starting the research off from scratch might not be a bad thing, and now my research would be online—no going to the library and writing old-fashioned paper and envelope-style letters looking for things like archival photo clearances. This dream has been around a while!

Whatever the dream turns out to be—a book on Italian WW I seaplanes or whatever, is made a little more possible by acquiring the basic skills on a project of less importance. This is only part-way along a particular learning curve, one that began four years ago, Jan. 1/2010 when I decided to publish a book if it killed me.

(So far it hasn’t)

All that posting and reading, all those photo-searches for my blog have paid off in terms of knowledge.

Theoretically, I am capable of putting together an online magazine, although it’s never been a high priority, and I think if that’s your dream, fine—but it has never been my dream.

That’s not to say I am unaware of the potential, another side effect of learning new things.

We learn new things and therefore we can see new possibilities—possibilities that didn’t exist in our own little universe before.

And if you want to pay for colour in the production of the book, you can even have colour, print-quality pictures in your POD. That affects the price of the product. But that’s all it affects, it doesn’t affect the ability to actually create the product.

So all this learning curve for one thing goes to support the learning curve for something else.

It all goes to experience and creating a database of simple skills that transfer from one genre or format to another.

Someone once said, “To keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results is insanity.”

In the four years I’ve been doing this, I have done plenty of things differently from the established way, and learned a few things.

However, doing a few things the same way as the established way might help to get different results, so we’ll put some thought into that along the way.

The thing there (maybe for the next little while) is to model ourselves after someone successful in the marketing department—how a successful author formats a book, (or most likely ships it out to someone else to format) is a question of lesser importance than how in the hell they manage to sell so many short stories, or how the hell they manage to license their works in so many ways.

Whether they write in the morning or evening, whether they like coffee or tea is irrelevant to my needs.

I need to learn how to attract readers, generate revenue from selling short stories, maybe put a little more thought into this and that, and so that’s what we’ll be studying, assuming that’s what we (or the reader) want to do.

Note: I ended up contacting Amazon support. The reason my file was not uploading correctly is because I needed to save it to a zip file, which you can do by highlighting it on your desktop and then right-clicking. Now click on 'send to' and select > zip folder.

That's what you upload to Kindle--not the ordinary html file.

The book, Love, Money, Sex and Death, Questions for the 21st Century, retails for $3.99 and will be available on Kindle tomorrow.

END

It was all so innocent in the beginning: I just wanted to publish a book if it killed me.

Here’s what that mistaken idea has mushroomed into.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Strong style, strong voice.

At least they put spaces between the words. Christopher Columbus' annotated Marco Polo.

(Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

I have a unique writing style.

I have a strong voice.

My writing style, and that voice, dictates the way the page is laid out to some extent.

In modern fiction, you will note that every chapter and every new scene begins with a block paragraph, even though every other paragraph in the book has an indent from the margin.

Indents help the reader’s eye to find the next paragraph. A book without indents would look very old fashioned, in fact the old Gothic manuscripts didn’t even have spaces between words.

The typeface or even hand lettering in those old books is practically unreadable by modern standards.

This is the only industry I know that has been in the experimental stage for several thousand years.

In the light of new knowledge, new challenges and new opportunities, we learn to do things just a bit differently.

***

A single sentence should have one idea, one action.

“John ran down the street.”

Here’s a ‘bad line’:

“John ran down the street and the kettle boiled.”

Taken all on its own, and with nothing else to support it, the second line makes a lot less sense.

A paragraph should have sentences that convey a fuller picture of the idea or action. Ah, but the first line of this particular story—my blog post, stands all on its own, full, complete, and needing nothing else. It’s not a bad hook, either, assuming the reader made it this far.

When you go on to the next idea or action, you go on to the next paragraph.

If you look at Anne R Allen’s blog post, you will see she’s talking about synopses, but she’s also talking about hooks, loglines, and pitches.

I like to have one good line at the beginning of a chapter or scene. I like to end on one was well.

The trouble is, what happens when I try to make it a block paragraph? It’s too short. The problem is worse when the chapter or scene begins with a short line of dialogue.

Conventional or traditional formatting has its limitations.

Not to indent the first line, in the case of dialogue, would simply look wrong when the line is a short one.

To indent that first line would be a ‘mistake,’ because it’s not a block paragraph. Their own rules hang them up to such an extent that a ‘good’ editor, i.e., one steeped in tradition, would ask the writer to rewrite that text so that it more properly conforms to the needs of the formatters.

To do that would be to lose something unique from that author, this ‘voice’ we keep hearing so much about.

The basic problem is pretty simple. I can’t use an indent where it’s clearly not called for, and then go ahead and use one when the first bit of a new chapter or scene has a bigger block of text and a block paragraph would actually work.

For that reason, I have developed a house style, that is a style of formatting that I use consistently from one book to the next.

The fact that they are all initially published as e-books does have some bearing on the history of this, for if a block of text is cut in half on a page-turn, it looks like a block paragraph anyway, although the letter in the upper left corner of the e-reader is not a capital letter because it occurs in the middle of a sentence.

A traditional book does that too, and readers are used to seeing it, so no one says anything.

It seems that the new technology spurred some new developments in formatting, or at least forced me to think about what I was doing and why I was doing it.

Should other writers now begin imitate my formatting style?

***

Just as a mental exercise, I’ve laid this out completely differently, please bear in mind this is a blog post and I never use indents on a blog post although I have experimented with them on another blog.

I have a unique writing style. I have a strong voice. My writing style, and that voice, dictates the way the page is laid out to some degree. In modern fiction, you will note that every chapter and every new scene begins with a block paragraph, even though every other paragraph in the book has an indent from the margin. Indents help the reader’s eye to find the next paragraph. A book without indents would look very old fashioned, in fact the old Gothic manuscripts didn’t even have spaces between words. The typeface or even hand lettering in those old books is practically unreadable by modern standards. A single sentence should have one idea, one action. “John ran down the street.” Here’s a ‘bad line’: “John ran down the street and the kettle boiled.” Taken all on its own, and with nothing else to support it, the second line makes a lot less sense. A paragraph should have sentences that convey a fuller picture of the idea or action. Ah, but the first line of this particular story—my blog post, stands all on its own, full, complete, and needing nothing else. It’s not a bad hook, either, assuming the reader made it this far. When you go on to the next idea or action, you go on to the next paragraph. If you look at Anne R Allen’s blog post, you will see she’s talking about synopses, but she’s also talking about hooks, log-lines, and pitches. I like to have one good line at the beginning of a chapter or scene. I like to end on one was well. The trouble is, what happens when I try to make it a block paragraph? It’s too short. The problem is worse when the chapter or scene begins with a short line of dialogue.Conventional or traditional formatting has its limitations. Not to indent the first line, in the case of dialogue, would simply look wrong when the line is a short one. To indent that first line would be a ‘mistake,’ because it’s not a block paragraph. Their own rules hang them up to such an extent that a ‘good’ editor, i.e., one steeped in tradition, would ask the writer to rewrite that text so that it more properly conforms to the needs of the formatters. To do that would be to lose something unique from that author, this ‘voice’ we keep hearing so much about. The basic problem is pretty simple. I can’t use an indent where it’s clearly not called for, and then go ahead and use one when the first bit of a new chapter or scene has a bigger block of text and a block paragraph would actually work. This is the only industry I know that has been in the experimental stage for several thousand years.

In the light of new knowledge, new challenges and new opportunities, we learn to do things just a bit differently.

For that reason, I have developed a house style, which is a style of formatting that I use consistently from one book to the next.

A traditional paperback might do that too, and readers are used to seeing it so no one says anything.

It seems that the new technology spurred some new developments in formatting, or at least forced me to think about what I was doing and why I was doing it.

Should other writers now begin imitate my formatting style?

***

I don’t know, ladies and gentlemen, but the first block paragraph in this second example sure is hard to follow, isn’t it?

That’s because I’m trying to jam too many ideas into the same paragraph. It is true that the example is also a bit exaggerated.

If I do something in one of my books, whether in the writing, the formatting, or whatever—the first weak term I have used in the entire story, it’s because I have a reason.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: I have a reason.

The funny thing is, no one ever asks the question.

END

“Hey, Andre.” De Garmeaux nodded at the floater. “Anything special?”

“Nah.” Sergeant Andre Levain shrugged. “It’s just another poor and anonymous soul who couldn’t take it anymore.”

A small group of onlookers on the street above stood in contrast to the pedestrians with umbrellas open and faces to the wind, refusing to even acknowledge their presence as they scurried past to their workplace. A line of buildings, windows impenetrable due to glare and grime, ignored the disruption and reflected and amplified shouts, bicycle bells and car horns. A few bleary-eyed faces were visible in a brightly lit café on the far side of the street as they read the papers and sipped scalding coffees.

***

This is from ‘The Art of Murder’ and it’s pretty obvious why I don’t want to use a ‘block paragraph,’ or more properly, no indent, for the first line. This is just one example. Yet whatever I do for formatting, I have to do it consistently over the full text.

Having evolved the strong style, and the strong voice, I might as well stick with it.

***

Friday, October 18, 2013

Digital Publishing, Quality Control.

Like that sullen Alex look.

Quality control is important in digital publishing because very often one person is doing everything themselves. If you haven’t done it too many times, it can be a murky process. More than anything, I want to be fresh and with a rational time slot available. I can upload to Smashwords or Kindle in about ten minutes, but if there is a problem, you don’t want to be running out the door to get a box of diapers or whatever right in the middle of fixing a problem with a book

When uploading to Smashwords, you need a clean .doc file as per the Smashwords Style Guide. As soon as it’s done converting, I download Epub and Kindle versions onto my desktop where I have the desktop Nook and Kindle reading apps. What I am looking for is good formatting. I want to see clean scene breaks, with the blocks of text above and below set at the right distance apart. Generally speaking, if the Kindle version looks good my Epub usually will too, but I flip through both of them right to the end. Then I go back to Smashwords and assign an ISBN, submit the converted file and have some fair degree of assurance that it will make it into the Premium Distribution Calalogue.

You want to read the chapter numbers on that Kindle version—recently I read : Chapter Four, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six…Chapter Seventeen, Chapter Nineteen…this is the time to fix it, right?

You want the right number of chapters!

What you are hoping for is a clean upload. Sooner or later the book will pop out onto the home page as a new release, and this puts a little pressure on the new author to do it right.

Before uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing, I take out the Smashwords standard disclaimer, as I have my own anyway, and Kindle certainly doesn’t require the Smashwords disclaimer!

On Kindle Direct Publishing, there is now spell-check for English-language titles. I always read this report. If you have a lot of made-up words, alien names or planets or whatever, those will always be ‘errors’ to the computer program, so make sure you proofread those for spelling thoroughly.

Fix all the ‘real’ errors and upload a corrected file. Use the digital previewer, and go right through to the end, as this is exactly how your book is going to look in a Kindle device. This is useful in helping an author to sleep at night—one or two reviews have mentioned “well-edited,” and good formatting, et cetera. (They also liked the story.)

I never use Digital Rights Management, as on Smashwords there is no provision for it anyway. If someone wants to pirate the book, they can do it easily enough. Since I give away thousands of books in a year, there’s not much demand for pirated books. I click ‘enable lending,’ and MatchBook since I have PODs.

There was a site once that had a free download of a title that I had been giving away for free. It was an old version, with an old and not very good cover. You can try and find a contact form, or an email address on the site. Generally speaking, they do take it down. If it’s just a ‘cheap ebooks’ site, and if all that is there is an image and buy link going back to Amazon or something don’t worry about it. Hope that they sell a few copies for you, as most likely they have an affiliate account and they’re making a small commission. It is not necessary to thank them.

Be glad someone thought they could make money on the book.

Uploading to Createspace is easy enough. For that I use the ebook file, format it, then save it as TitlePOD or whatever, and if I update a version I’ll put Oct13 or something on the end of the file name.

I wrote a blog post on version control, because after a while you just spawn so many files. In my case I tend to back them up like a squirrel, all over the place. I’m sort of worried the computer will crash, and every so often there is an odd-ball glitch that just locks up a file on me.

Another thing is to e-mail those files to yourself at the end of every working day. For that you need maybe two accounts.

My chapter number is six 12-pt spaces down.

A paperback is obviously formatted differently than an ebook. You can and should have page numbers for example. But also, I put section breaks in for the front matter and end matter, so the page numbers are only in the actual book. If you have a foreword, stuff like a dedication, acknowledgements, that’s front matter too—no page numbers, no headers, etc.

The free cover templates on Createspace are easy to use with a little fiddling around, and like many other self-publishing sites there are professional cover and formatting services available.

Learning to do everything myself keeps the cost down and gives me a bit of power in a sense—now I can write how-to articles and post them on my blog, and it might be helpful to someone else along the line.

Before uploading my next two ebooks and five more POD files, I will proof each file at least one more time, take a look at the covers again, get a marketing image (and maybe a better title for Collection # 4 Dark Satires) and ISBNs, write blurbs for new titles, and stuff all that into a folder on the desktop. For one thing,

I’ve been thinking of a new image for Core Values. It’s not ready to upload until I have a cover.

The books will be uploaded in order of priority:

Third World > my new science fiction novel > ebook > Smashwrods > Kindle > POD

Collection # 4 > ebook SW > K > POD

Engines of Creation > POD after ebook published around Dec 1. The ebook is already on the platform, it’s just been unpublished after uploading. (That one had a small error which I think has been fixed as well.)

But the Kindle version is not fixed. That’s why I make lists in the first place.)

Ghost Planet > upload POD file and cover to Createspace as the ebook is already published.

Core Values > POD this book has been out for three years so it’s high time I made the POD, however it’s not my highest priority in uploading. During the POD file creation process, I noticed one error, so after this is done I will go back, fix the .doc file, upload to SW and then upload an .html file, a corrected one, to Kindle.

During the POD process I might have to go back and forth between Createspace and my desktop via tabs to fiddle with marketing images; as often the name and title are off-center a wee bit, and sometimes it can’t be adjusted properly with the free templates that I use.

Once your POD goes live on Createspace, it will be automatically linked to your ebook on Amazon after about a week, but you have to check and if it doesn’t show up, contact them through the form on the site and tell them. On Smashwords you can also link to a print version from the ‘manage links’button on the right side of your book’s page.

Notes: on Kindle, as long as you haven’t completed the second of the two publishing pages, you can quit and the thing will be saved as a draft. You can trouble-shoot and go back later with no harm done. On SW, you can always unpublish and when you come back a few minutes later, uploading begins the conversion and submission process again. Simply do the coversion and proof them puppies one more time.

On Createspace and other platforms there are digital proofers, human review, and in many sites you can download PDFs to your computer and see how your book turned out.

Since it takes about a week for a POD to pop up on Amazon, presumably you could do PODs first and then upload your ebook. As an experiment, I loaded up to Amazon and used their spell-check as it saves me the time of scrolling through fifteen times. Then I fixed the .doc file and published it first on Smashwords. Over time, I have evolved a process, and yet if you haven’t done it in a while, or if you’re nodding off to sleep, it can definitely still be irritating. That’s why I like to have a bit of time—enough time and forsight and it’s just less stressful.

Ebooks and paperbacks of the same title must have different ISBNs, and if you even change the colour of paper, (I read this on Createspace) you will need a new ISBN.

With a Createspace assigned ISBN, (free) they are the publisher of record.

With a Smashwords-assigned ISBN, they are the publisher of record, with your own ISBN, you are the publisher of record.

POD tips: Use mirrored margins, and use the format header and footer feature to raise your header and lower your page numbers away from the text. There is a minimum gutter depending on the number of pages. A wider page margin at the top lowers the top of the text.

You can stop the process and go back to the document in order to fiddle with that. Upload it as many times as necessary to get it as good as you can get it.

As things stand right now, (Friday, October 18,) I have had to ‘nuke’ my new collection Dark Satires, but Third World went through just fine. The collection has stories that go back some years and have been through two or three computers and two or three crashes. So now I upload Dark Satires to Amazon, and this evening I’ll put them up on Createspace as PODs.

After that, I have another several PODs to do, but no more ebooks for a while.

Nuking a File.

To nuke a file, save it as a .txt document. Highlight the whole .txt document and then copy and paste that into a fresh, blank .doc file. Now re-format the thing from scratch, although the .txt saves scene breaks and indents. It will strip out bold, italics, bigger fonts for titles, stuff like that. Comb through the file carefully, and if it takes an hour to redo it, it’s better than releasing a badly-formatted product.

Here’s my new science-fiction novel Third World on Smashwords.

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