Sojourn ready for formatting

[mmegaera]

I spent most of today giving Sojourn its last read-through.  So, finally, my “highway patrolman crashes his car out in the middle of nowhere and winds up in the local equivalent of Brigadoon” story is ready for formatting!

Another week or two and I will be announcing publication, I hope.

Mirrored from Repeating History.

Comments

[archangelbeth]

*more cheering*

Yaaaaaaaaay!!

[mmegaera]

You are an excellent cheering section, ma'am.

Having some problems with Amazon and my formatting. Both the html and Word versions are randomly changing bits of the formatting when I upload and preview them, which is both weird and the first time that's happened. And, of course I'm having trouble getting Amazon to actually read my question and answer it instead of giving me random bits of boilerplate that have nothing to do with my actual questions. Other than that, making progress, I think.

[archangelbeth]

I am very startled that it would change 'round the HTML version! (I have had it screw with Word, sure...)

Grab the HTML version and edit it and upload that, I assume you've tried?

Good luck...

[mmegaera]

Yup. It italicizes random bits, like some chapter headings but not others, among other things. How would I grab the html to edit it? I know enough basic html to do that, but I don't know how to get to the marked up version to do that.

Never mind, I do know how, too. Problem is, when I open the html version I created (using Mobipocket Creator, which is how I've always done it before) up in Notepad, there's no markup showing the wrong stuff as italicized. Which actually makes sense, because if I just open the Mobipocket html version, *there are no wrongly-placed italics in that file.* It's only when I upload it to Amazon and open the preview screen that I see the wrongly-placed italics. So it's something during the upload process that's screwing things up.

I still haven't heard back from Amazon, either, except for the boilerplate "fix your indents that look just fine in the preview and therefore don't need fixing, and we're going to ignore the actual questions you asked" email that I replied to yesterday.

Maybe they don't work on Sunday. One can only hope.

[archangelbeth]

This may make no sense... But I'd say, grab the HTML that Amazon generates, double-check to make sure that there's no italics in the stuff it's randomly putting italics in, remove if any are there -- and then upload the Amazon version. It may be some bug in the converter that is doing bad things with stylesheets in mobipocket-created stuff, and if you upload something that Amazon has made itself, the tagging will be such that it'll be more useable.

...is it only a few places? Could those be places that had previously had the editorial-notes inserted, like the few comments I found in that file?

[mmegaera]

I have no idea how to grab the Amazon html. Do you know how? I've always used Mobipocket to convert my books before uploading before, and never had a problem. I got rid of all the comments, one by painstaking one [wry g].


Still haven't heard back from Amazon. I guess now I go try to find a phone number (if such a thing exists).

[archangelbeth]

Go to Edit Document in the Bookshelf (should get you https://kdp.amazon.com/title-setup/ and then a code), there will be on that page a box that says "Downloadable Previewer." One of the options is "Download HTML."

Click "Download HTML" and you will get a zip file. Unzip it, and you get three other folders, one of which says HTML. Open the HTML folder, and you'll get some funny-named .html file. That should be the HTML that Amazon has generated.

Open that, scream at how messy it is, and see if you can find the Bad Italics places. In the times when it's converted Word files with mistakes (which is how I know how to do all this...), the mistakes are present in the HTML file they generate, too.

Fix the mistakes, delete anything having to do with mobipocket in the headers just in case, re-name the file, and upload that. Should work.

[mmegaera]

Eep. I suspect this is beyond my very basic knowledge of html (I used to know enough to build a basic website (no CSS) from scratch using a text editor, but that's about it). But I'll try...

Thanks for the instructions.

[tiptoes dubiously back to Amazon]

[mmegaera]

Okay. Really uncle. I monkeyed around with the spacing in the html version, and managed to fix most of it and cried uncle on the rest (it's not bad enough that anyone else is going to notice it, just fuddly stuff that I was being anal retentive about), and uploaded it. If I hear back from Amazon with some magical way to fix that, then fine.

Directly uploading the Word version (which Amazon says it prefers authors to do -- and if that's the case they need to make it *work*) is unsalvageable because it won't let me edit Amazon html created by uploading the Word version.

So. Done. Ptui.

[mmegaera]

Well, that's fascinating. Downloaded the html file, but --

It won't let me open the file in anything but my web browser (yes, I right-clicked, but there's no "open with" option), so I can't make any corrections. The italics are right there, though.

[whistles Twilight Zone theme]

Uncle.

[archangelbeth]

Yeah, it was acting weird like that for me, too, but I thought it was just because I was experimenting with the one in Russian which it won't actually let me make available. *ptui* Try changing the extension to .txt instead of .html, opening, then fixing back to .html? (Or how did you make yours work?)

[mmegaera]

I didn't, unless you count uploading it a second (third?, fourth?) time. I must have been holding my mouth right that time [wry g].

And this is why I really hate technology. I want to know why it works or doesn't work so randomly. I want a solid, understandable reason for each bloody time, darnit!

[archangelbeth]

Yeah, the error that I was having -- where the formatting/tabbing/whitespace around certain short paragraphs (short one-sentence ones) was getting mucked up -- was VERY annoying. Though consistent, at least. (Till I fixed the HTML. O:p )

And people say the Smashwords Meatgrinder is annoying! O:p

[mmegaera]

I've had far less trouble uploading to Smashwords than I have with Amazon. [shrug]

[archangelbeth]

*hi5s solemnly* That's about my experience, too. Plus Smashwords tech support tends to be a bit better than Amazon's, if slower, usually.

[mmegaera]

Precisely. I do wonder about all those people who complain about Smashwords's meatgrinder on their blogs, though.

[archangelbeth]

I can never quite fathom what they are complaining about. Lack of ability to play with kerning? Font selection? (It's MY book, as a reader! I control the font! I control the size and spacing! ...okay, not if it's An Interior Life, where font was a large part of the thing and used in some cool ways, but everything else? MINE. My eyes, my reading, my font-control. Gitcher little authorial fingers outta my text.)

Meatgrinder has some necessities, but, lords, I've done worse for less money, and work-for-hire into the bargain!

[mmegaera]

And even Smashwords will let you directly upload an epub nowadays, so if you're *really* anal, you can have it exactly as you like it.

[shrugs again] I just don't get it, either.

[archangelbeth]

I suppose if I realllllly wanted to have art in the interior of the book, or such, but... Meh, so many different screen shapes! Why bother? A little minimal attention to detail and get out of the way of the reading!

Which is to say, Yeah. O:/

[mmegaera]

It was even easier to add photos to the chapter headings for Cross-Country in Smashwords than it was in Amazon. The meatgrinder didn't chew them up and put them right where I wanted them. I had to jump through half a dozen hoops to get Amazon to do the same thing.