Which just goes to prove once again that 'the first casualty of any engagement is the battle plan". $:-)
9:35 p.m. eastern time, Monday night
I just finished a 16-hour non-stop marathon of reformatting my EFAD Word doc to what they needed on Kindle, to not wind up with the scene line breaks mashed together in the finished product. I got a form email last week saying I have had formatting errors discovered, “do it again with filtered HTML for Word, etc.”
So I’ve redone it and reuploaded it several times since then. I actually downloaded it to the Kindle for PC app last night, thinking it would be perfect, (it looked fine in the Kindle upload preview pane) and all the scene change line-breaks were mashed together with no space at all! Just the bolded first line of the next scene, to tell you the scene changed. Unsat, not ready for prime time!
It’s been driving me crazy, it’s a long story, but I had to bite the bullet and redo it again before March 1. Manually, checking line by line. But I got her done. I’m so tired I can’t think or write tonight. I’ll push the FB and Twitter buttons for a few minutes, and then collapse.
What a waste of a “D-minus” day! Had to be done, though.
If you go to the Kindle store, it should show EFAD “under review” or something. When it comes back up “live” (for sale, ready, etc) in about 6-10 hours, it should be perfectly formatted for new readers.
Besides fixing the smashed-together line breaks, (I used **** in between scenes to be double sure) I also improved my use of hyphens, numbers (sixteen vs 16 etc in the text) and so on to give it a more polished look. It was my first, and in 2003, I was rather casual in my hypen use and other style book issues. EFAD is a 260K word novel, with about 20K of DETR now tacked onto the end of the Kindle version now as a preview. Yikes, what a day! But it’s done.
Sorry for not posting today. I did NOT plan to put 16 straight hours into this line-by-line review of EFAD and fixing process, but it will be a smoother, more polished book with correct “style book” hypen use, etc, in the Kindle version on Thursday, D-day.
Matt
I was in the shop most of the day and couldn't tweet much but I see that there were probably about 400+ #EFAD tweets going across. A lot of new blogs/sites with EFAD content, and a whole bunch of new individuals tweeting. In fact, my rough estimate says that the last 24 hours probably doubled the previous few days!
Tomorrow (whenever it is that you wake up!) will be another day!
Thanks, pal....we are with you all the way!
SJB
Oh yeah.....
Evening
B U M P
And why did Laz not do this FOR you???
*ducks and runs*
Thanks, Matt...you da man!!!
As someone who has been reading almost all of your books on the Kindle, the formatting errors have been noticed.
Your first book is the only one that I have not read yet, so your extra efforts are most appreciated.
Keep up the outstanding work!
Which just goes to prove once again that 'the first casualty of any engagement is the battle plan". $:-)
Isn’t eReader formatting fun? I’ve played around with it in developing short articles of interest I can read on my Kindle. I’ll find something online of a historical nature, develop it in Word, then save to HTML. I use Calibre to convert to ePub/Mobi formats. I still haven’t figured out what Word formatting is the best.