The ebook journey - Part seven: Finding formatting gliches

Finally!

It’s time to upload the spiffed up, cleaned up, formatted, reformatted, html file of the novel.

Or so I thought.

After following the directions and confirming the coding by searching for and finding several sources, I believed the product was ready to upload and preview.

Hmmm. We know about those “best laid plans.”

Apparently, after fifteen reformats, there’s a problem getting the images to show up in the preview. I’ve used only two – a version of the cover and a little vignette to separate some of the sections in the novel.

Neither image shows in the preview. In fact, there’s some little camera icon with that scary little exclamation point inside a triangle – you know, the one that serves as a warning that you’ve done something wrong.

Interestingly, both images displayed properly in the two ebook readers I used to review my changes.

So it’s back to the drawing board to see if I can figure out what the deal is.

The ebook journey: Part six- cover design

I've made a mock-up of the cover for the novel I've been putting into ebook format. 

How does it look?

The ebook journey: Part five - editing and proofing

Following the guidelines from Guido Henkel, the first pass of the ebook formatting went well.

Viewing the results in my browsers (I used Firefox, Explorer and Chrome), I was able to read it over. This doesn't show page breaks, of course, but it's a good way to check for coding errors. I also noticed a couple of problems with chapter heads and italics. (I use italics a lot.) So, it was back to html for redo.

I'm not a perfectionist in my everyday life. Good enough works for me most of the time. You know, a swift wipe with a cloth works; no need for polish and wax. That sort of thing. But when it comes to something that's going to last, it has to be as perfect as I can make it.

Even though I have kindle for the PC, I'm not able to use the app to review my own work. So my next step was to look for some kind of software that would output the look and feel of an ebook. For this, I downloaded Calibre and followed the directions outlined in Henkel's post.

Great! Except! Viewing the draft wasn't okay but some cliches did occur, so I opted to get some additional reader software, just to double check. Firefox has a an add-on reader called EPUBReader that worked well.

Finally, we're getting somewhere! I'll soon be ready for a kindle upload.

The ebook journey: Part four - copyright permissions solved

I've decided.

The lyrics are gone!

Maybe one day some big movie company will option the rights to the novel and I'll hand over the original manuscript, lyrics intact, and let them work it out. (One can aspire!)

Maybe one day my ebook will become an electronic best seller and I'll be able to hire someone to get the permissions needed for the copyrighted lyrics and I'll do a second edition. (One can aspire.)

The ebook journey: Part three - copyright permissions

Oh crap!

I mean it!

Oh crap!

My novel uses various song lyrics to set the tone of different chapters and I'm about to strip all of them out.

Here's the deal. Song lyrics are protected by copyright and in order to use them, you have to get permission from the copyright holder.

Well, let me tell you, this is a daunting task.

First you have to find out who owns the rights. Not so hard? Don't bet on it. Sometimes the author owns the rights; sometimes the rights have been transferred, not once, not twice but three times. Sometimes, the owner of the copyright is dead, which means looking for heirs. Then, if you manage to get to the end of the search, you might have to pay for using the rights.

This could take longer than it took to write the darn novel!

This seems weird, especially since the lyrics are spread across the web in dozens of sites, with no permission and sometimes without attribution.

But that's how it works. Don't believe me? Check out this article from the Stanford University Libraries.

The book journey: Part two - formatting your ebook

A few years back (Please don't ask how many.), I decided to do an online newsletter at work. Using Microsoft Word as my platform, I created the content then exported it as html.

Let me tell you, the output was outrageously complicated, not so much in the look in feel of the copy as in the editing phase. The html code looked like an ancient foreign language.

This lead me to research html for beginners. Thankfully, the web was (and still is) filled with instructions for html coding. I dug in, opened my file in Notepad, and began deleting all the extraneous Word stuff in the coding. Trial and error, undo and save, hit and miss, start anew ... eventually the newsletter made it to the web in (almost) perfect coding.

Remembering all this made my decision not to format my ebook directly from Word easy.

What made it even easier?

I came across a nine-part post by Guido Henkel titled Take pride in your eBook formatting. Suddenly, the task is turning from a dark and stormy night to a breezy, sunny day. If you haven't seen the post, take a look at it and you'll understand that the task of formatting doesn't have to weigh you down.

Henkel recommended some editing software but I've been using a free and extremely easy program called html kit, which I found back then, so I'm using that.

Granted, the conversion will take time, but right now it's looking up.

(For those who need an even tighter, more thorough look at formatting for Kindle, check out this book.)

***

(See Part One of the journey)

The ebook journey begins: Part one

Been reading instructions for ebook formatting ... so many different opinions. Should you use pdf, transfer directly from a word processor, format in html, hire a pro, download software?

Just to muck up the works, it looks like different readers use different submission guidelines.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.