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| 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?
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| 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.
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| 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 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.
END
