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Hi guys!
In preparation for publishing Strange Ideas: Death, Destiny and Decisions, I decided this week to have a test run with the already-available-on-Kindle-and-doing-very-nicely-thank-you-very-much-for-asking Late: a ghostly tale. It was an interesting experience...
I naively assumed it would be simple, seeing as I already had a finished manuscript, a cover, a blurb etc. Not so. It took me five attempts.
Firstly, I had a job ensuring the facing pages appeared correctly. That was two attempts. What looked fine in Word was taken by goblins at some point in the uploading process and jiggled about randomly. Page breaks worked fine in some places, and were ignored in others. Grrrrr...
Then the page numbers jumped around so the story began on page 9, not page 1. Infuriating! That was one more attempt. Finally, having solved page numbers, I uploaded the perfect (ha!) final version, only to find the goblins were back and that the pages had moved themselves- so I had to faff about with page breaks again...
Fifth attempt- Success at last! Aaaaand relax.
It doesn't bode well for Strange Ideas; Late is one story, no chapters, nothing complicated at all. Strange Ideas is five stories, with separate "chapter" headers and all sorts of clever-whizzy things that I only half understand. I think it might take a few more than five goes at it. This is why I have set the release date for May 27th- to give me enough time to upload twenty different versions until it works properly!
A quick google revealed that it wasn't just me being thick- many indies have formatting problems that only appear when publishing through Createspace, although it does seem to be the most straight-forward by far. I've heard scary stories about Smashwords' "meat-grinder" that have put me right off!
Anyway, the upshot is that Late: a ghostly tale is now available for all those people who have told me they'd love to read it but don't have a Kindle. A quick search on Amazon will find it- thanks in advance to those who make the purchase! Feel free to chase me around Tesco to sign it for you ; )
Enjoy the rest of your day xxx
Congrats on your first paperback!
ReplyDeleteIt is much easier to upload a pdf than a word doc on Createspace.
Do not even get me started on Smashword's meatgrinder though. I am still having flashbacks/nightmares about that one. And I still didn't get it 100% perfect.
Ahhh... thank you! And thanks for the top tip- pdf it will be then! I'm deffo too scared to use Smashwords! Formatting the book was fun (apart from the uploading bit), but formatting for Kindle is way easier.
DeleteI still haven't gone down the Createspace route yet - I'd be interested to hear whether you sell more as paperback or for kindle. Not sure what's stopping me actually ...
ReplyDeleteI did Late as an experiment- to test it out before doing Strange Ideas, but I've already had 5 sales! I think it's friends who wanted to support me but didn't have kindles. It's a new way to get it out there though. I think you should give it a try. If you're reasonably tech-savvy (and you must be, having formatted for kindle) then it doesn't take too long to figure it out. You've done the hard work (writing!) already, so why not? I would imagine I'll still sell more eBooks than paperbacks for Late, but Strange Ideas might be different as it's a chunkier book and people like that. How exciting!
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