To TOC or not to TOC

Posted on April 7, 2013 by

Well, again on the Mobilreads forum, that’s a forum for all of us who produce ebooks for Kindle as well as epub… on a thread that has been ongoing for months about the Start point in Kindle ebooks… we have found that Amazon is doing something to our books even after they are uploaded. Here’s the story so far.

Back about last December Amazon started re-setting the Start point on ebooks, well on some ebooks. In the process that I and others use to produce Kindle content(and there are many ways to make a Kindle ebook) We start with an HTML file which has already been tagged with a Start point (Start_Reading) usually either on the Prologue if there is one, or if not on Chapter 1. Lately most of my clients want a Reader Letter right before the start of the book, so I put the Start_Reading tag there.

Then I take that ‘tagged’ HTML file, put it into Calibre and build an epub. But there’s more. Then I take the epub into a program called Sigil, a text editor that works with epubs as well as HTML, and re-tag all my points… Cover, Title page, copyright page, Table of Contents, and Start_Reading although the guide feature in Sigil calls this merely ‘text’.

Now here may be the problem. Amazon really wants the Table of Contents to be in the front of the book as if this were a non-fiction. But these books aren’t non-fiction and don’t even need a TOC, it’s just a courtesy to readers to put one in so they can get to things like… well, the Reader Letter, Acknowledgments, Dedications, Author Bio… stuff like that. But most of my clients don’t like to clutter up the front of the book with these things… they want me to put some of it in the back, most particularly the TOC. It affects the Sample size of the book. If your TOC runs 3 pages, then that’s 3 pages less of actual text.

The thread on Mobilreads has been discussing this lately and thinks Amazon has been inserting their own ‘Start-Reading’ tags or SRL willy-nilly (well, not really, they do have a process) into a book after it’s uploaded. They want the book to open at the text right after the TOC. AND if you don’t do this then it may affect these features “If You Liked The Book” and “Last Page Read”. That’s the rub, we don’t actually know if it DOES affect those features.

Do you see the problem? The TOCs in my books are at the end! Now I haven’t noticed that any of the books I have produced since December have a wonky start, or that the TOC cannot be accessed with the little ‘open book’ icon on my kindle… but then I’m not buying those books… They haven’t actually gone through the upload process at Amazon (or KDP their publishing site). And none of my clients have gotten letters either from Amazon or from Readers that their purchased books have a weird start point. But… I guess I’m putting the TOC back at the beginning where Amazon wants it. Most of the books that I have on my Kindle (the purchased books… and I have several hundred) open just fine where they’re supposed to and also most have the TOC in the back of the book. One of my Mobilreads buddies even said that James Patterson… well his formatter, I’m sure he doesn’t format his own books… puts a mini-TOC in the front of the book which is linked to the actual TOC in the back… I may try that… but personally I don’t think readers will know what to do with a Mini-TOC… maybe I’ll have to get a sample of one of his books and see what one looks like.

I think I shall take my problem to the top… tech support at KDP (Kindle’s publishing site). I’ll let you know how that goes!

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Time Got Away From Me

Posted on March 12, 2013 by

Wow, it’s been a few months since I blogged. That’s what happens when you’re working with clients and trying to finish 3 of your own novels. But I seem to have a window of opportunity today, and I’ve learned some new things lately so I thought I’d pass the info on.

1) There are still reasons to use a distributor such as Smashwords or Vook to make sure that all of the eRetailers have access to your prose. However, lately many of my clients are getting publisher accounts at not only B&N but also Kobo and iTunes/iBooks. They are asking me to just format an epub and a mobi/Kindle for them instead of the very simple Word document that Smashwords and others require. This is good for me because I can work on just one format and not two.

2) Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. This just means that you can use more simple styles such as Normal and Center and adapt them to your needs on the fly so to speak. If all of a sudden you would like a regular paragraph (Normal, with an indent of 0.25″, single space) to have a trailing space in just this one instance of 12pt or 1 blank line, then you just adjust that one paragraph (with your ‘Paragraph’ feature on the ‘Home’ ribbon of your Word program) but leave the style at Normal. This works well with Word docs and epubs but doesn’t work for most older Kindle eReaders as they don’t ‘read’ the CSS style of formatting. So to get my formatted eBooks to look correct in ALL eReaders (epubs and Kindle) I have set up specific styles for every instance… a) that trailing 12pt space is now a Style named Normal12 b) An entire paragraph of italics within normal text is now NormalItalic c) A line of italics which is centered is CenterItalic… the list goes on to about 40 specific styles. So when I’m formatting using the more complex epub or Kindle KF8 formats, and I run into a section of text such as a poem or a dream-sequence, I just pull up that NormalItalic (dream-sequence, the entire paragraph is italicized) or CenterItalic (poem) and… voila… every eReader will see what I want them to see. CSS vx Complex Styles for Kindle was one of the most confusing aspects of the formatting process that I had to overcome. I’m actually working on a tutorial which can be viewed soon on my website (www.athirstymind.com) I find that most of my clients aren’t familiar with using or adding Styles to their Style set on the Home ribbon and I hope after viewing this tutorial, they are at least on the same page when I talk to them about Styles.

3) Editing epubs using Sigil. This little free program is actually fantastic, a text editor similar to Notepad but with a WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get feature so you don’t have to blow up your brain looking at HTML code! You drop an epub file into the program and you can choose Book View (WYSISYG) or Code View (HTML). Say a reader complains about a typo in Chapter 6… ‘comer’ instead of ‘corner’… a very very common OCR error. Well you go to Chapter 6 in your epub… by the way, each chapter/page break will be a separate html file in this program because that’s the way an epub is constructed so you have to actually find (on your left you will see a menu listing each file in the epub) the Chapter 6 file, then you can search for ‘comer’ in the text with the search feature… then just correct the word and save the file… There… you have a corrected epub to upload a new version to the eRetailers or just send the epub file directly to your reader for them to sideload into their device. This ‘save’ feature will overwrite your original epub, so be careful with it. If you’re editing something like buy-links that you want to go only into B&N or Amazon, then use the ‘save as’ button instead and it will give you a chance to name this new epub with buy-links something like booktitlewbuylinks.epub. But you won’t have added those buylinks to the original epub file. Lots of site that let you upload your epub book to them don’t let you have links within the file to any other eRetailer. And now that you can actually upload an epub at Smashwords, you don’t want to have that buylink in the epub for Smashwords.

4) By the way… epubs to Smashwords. If you are uploading an epub there remember you must leave in that “Smashwords version” phrase which lives in the Smashwords Word file on the copyright page. If it’s not there, they will reject your file. But you want to take this phrase off of any epub that you upload yourself to B&N or iBooks or Kobo. A good time to use that ‘save as’ feature at Sigil I’m thinking.

5) Editing a mobi file. This is a bit different but if you have a corrected epub (see above) then you can use KindlePreviewer, a free Amazon program, to quickly convert that corrected epub into a mobi file and upload the new version to Amazon.

6) Changing the name of a ‘converted through Kindle Previewer’ mobi file. This may seem weird, but when Kindle Previewer converts an epub to a mobi file with the old mobi format plus the new KF8 format entwined in the same file, you get this humongously long file name. I don’t know about your computer, but mine will accept that name, but my offsite backup program will not because the path is too long. So I have to go into my documents folder, find the file that was converted, then rename it. This is normally a very simple process but for some reason (on my Dell Windows 7 computer) if you don’t do this exactly right the renaming process (for just these Kindle Previewer converted files) will blow up in your face. At least you’ll get a dire warning about the file not being usable and are you sure you want to do this. So for me I have to do it exactly this way… every damn time… a) at the end of the file name you will see a long string of date and time numbers, you don’t need those b) highlight the number after the underline _2013-11-3-12:30 highlight everything after the underline but stop before the last -45 or whatever you have at the very end with a dash and a number. _2013-11-3-12-30-45 everything between the underline and the -45. Then delete the highlighted material. c) in step three you backspace and take the underline _ out d) step four you delete the -45 although I don’t highlight it, I just hit ‘delete’ 3 times until it’s not there anymore. OK, you ask, and why will this work like this instead of just deleting the extra numbers and underlines? I haven’t a clue, but that’s what I have to do on my computer. ‘Tis a puzzlement! This kind of file is the only file that a simple re-name doesn’t work on.

7) Embedding fonts… and what that actually means particularly to a Kindle Reader. I got hung up on this a few months ago. Before that the conversion software I was using to make a Kindle or prc file could overcome this ‘embedded file’ issue. At least when I formatted a book for Kindle/prc and previewed it I could access all kinds of fonts on my Kindle device and apps. However, since the onslaught of Kindlegen, the conversion of choice for all Kindle ebooks, if you have set your default font to Times New Roman or used TNR in your Style descriptions… then this is considered embedding. And that’s the only font available to use. So my Kindle Fire can only ‘see’ Times New Roman, and cannot substitute Arial, or Verdana or Courier or Caecilia. At this point of frustration I contacted by wonderful wizards on Mobilereads… a forum for ebook users and formatters. They suggested that I edit out all instances of fonts in my HTML file for each ebook. Well the best way to do this is to edit the ‘Style Sheet’ within Sigil. Now the first step in my Sigil edit process (where I tweak the heading font sizes and add Guides to the cover, copyright data, table of content as well as where I want the ebook to begin or start) is to go through each listed Style and just take out that font line. The ebook still has the font (Times New Roman) but it’s no longer considered ‘embedded’. A Reader can now choose whatever font is available on their specific reading device to enjoy my fantastically formatted eBook!!! However, since you’re working within an epub (which will soon be converted to a Kindle file) you can actually choose to embed a specific font for your Title, your Chapter Headings and maybe a specific section of your text such as that NormalItalic Style. This has some interesting possibilities actually. I may try this with my client’s permission on an upcoming format. I’ll let you know the outcome.

This blog post seems a bit disjointed, but maybe you can find a couple gems of wisdom among the weirdness.

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You learn something new… every darn day!

Posted on November 23, 2012 by

Ok, this is a new wrinkle in the formatting adventure. Today a client forwarded an email from Amazon telling the author that a reader had complained that when she tried to read her book in the ‘night’ view (black background, white text), the book disappeared. Amazon said that the text color was ‘forced’ in the file.

What? I didn’t even know you could do that… force a text color… it’s not something that I even  look at! I just assumed that when I did the initial Word format of the book, and chose the Styles (Normal for all the text), then everything would be hunky-dory.

Not so, apparently. When you look at (modify) your styles/font… there is a small text color box which should be set to ‘automatic’. Well, I looked back at some of my former ebook formats… and the ‘Normal’ style was set to ‘automatic’.  However, on this particular ebook, that text color box was set to ‘black’. Who knew? And how did it get set like that?  Fairies and trolls, and the trolls were winning that day, I guess.

Anyway, it was a very simple fix within the code view of Sigil… and then a quick re-convert through Kindlegen. So no problem… but it got me concerned about other books. I spent the afternoon looking at HTML code. Yikes!

The moral of this story is. Don’t force anything on anybody.  And another thing… who in the world reads in that awful ‘night’ view anyway! Black background, white text is so 80s, isn’t it? And it’s awful on your eyes. The only thing I can think is that maybe that’s a good way to read on a Kindle in bright sunlight… although it’s winter here in Maine and we don’t have much sunlight, and it will freeze your ‘whatevers’ off if you go outside to read anyway!

So if anyone out there has a problem like this, reading in the ‘night’ mode, tell your formatter that something is set as ‘color:black’ in the html base of the file.

 

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iBooks, is there a change happening?

Posted on July 22, 2012 by

Just recently I’ve had two clients who have either had their books rejected at Apple without reason, or books have been taken down after they’ve been live for a considerable length of time. Let me start with the latter first, because it is most troubling.

A client sent me a Smashwords doc (Smashwords converts a Word file to an epub and distributes to Apple) with the comment that Apple said that there were many font inconsistencies in the book and they were taking it out of publication.  So, since this is something I do everyday, I opened the file to look. Well, it wasn’t formatted as I would format a file for Smashwords, 1.25 spaces between paragraphs instead of single space, the centering of lines wasn’t actually centered (this is easy to do as you have to not just push that ‘center’ button but go into ‘Paragraphs’ and make sure that there is no indent at ‘Special’). The font was Times New Roman throughout, so no font inconsistencies here! There were some errors, typos and formatting, but nothing egregious, something I see in almost every book I read on my Kindle or iPad, usually  not in books I’ve formatted though.

So instead of arguing with Apple or Smashwords, I just purged the file, re-inserted the italics, re-formatted the styles: Normal, Title, Center and Heading 1, and sent it back to the client for re-uploading at Smashwords.  I also warned her that since it was past the July 15 date for those new cover specs, that she should remember to upload her big honkin’ cover, 1600×2400 or something around that.

The next client (and I did do the conversion on this one) forwarded me an email from Smashwords saying that Apple/iBooks had rejected her file but gave no reason. The guys at Smashwords said that they were looking into this and would get back to her… no news yet. But again, if she wants to try once more at Apple, we’ll have to get the new bigger cover uploaded. What a pain!

What I’m thinking, and I’d like your opinions here, is that Apple is trying to upgrade the look of their site and taking down some books which they don’t think (the covers, not the content) look good enough from this new make-over. Hmmm. At least Amazon has assured us (when they put out the new covers specs which are pretty much the specs you’ll need for Apple) that they wouldn’t be taking down books with covers that didn’t fit to their specifications, but that the covers might not show up on their product page.

Personally and professionally, I’m troubled by all these changes. I know the eRetailers want their sites to look good, but their business is supporting authors. Without those authors they don’t have a business, now do they. I’m hoping that these two instances are just aberrations, and that this won’t be happening to any other clients. I’m also concerned that if there were errors in the content of these books, that Smashwords (who actually converts them into epubs) didn’t catch the errors before the books made it into their Premium Catalog. They’ve always done that in the past, and early on in my career I had a couple of books that had to be re-formatted and sent back to Smash because of some font and content issues, thankfully nothing in the last year though. So will I be getting more books back from Smash? And if there’s nothing wrong with them, and I dump Word docs into HTML to make sure, what do I do?

It’s a conundrum and I and my clients would like your feed-back.

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Fixing old ebooks

Posted on July 11, 2012 by

Just recently one of my clients wanted to upload three of her books onto a new site, but she couldn’t find her ‘final’ epubs. I looked on my computer and her folder was a mess… she was my first client and I was just learning… and learning… and learning. Now I have a client folder, inside that –  one folder for each book… all formats… easy to find.  So we found the latest date… and went from there, but even then, there was lots of tweaking going on in Sigil to make the TOC work and to be sure the ebook validated through IDPF, the International Digital Publishing Forum.

So, I guess this is a warning about organization. Think ahead. I guarantee that next year or the year after you’ll want to upload a new cover, add some content, change out your dedication (maybe taking off your ex’s name… life changes, you know).

And remember to have those honkin’ big display covers on hand… and check current image specs at Smashwords, Kindle and the other eRetailers such as B&N/PubIt, iBooks/iTunes (you can get a publishing account there now, and upload directly to iBooks using an epub).

Technology is changing so fast. As long as you just upload your ebook and forget it you’ll probably be ok, but if you ever want to tweak it, then all bets are off, new rules apply, particularly with cover images and I would think formatting of the new versions that you want to upload to all the ebook sites.

I’ve learned my lesson today… organization, organization, organization. Words to rule your life!

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Kindle Previewer

Posted on July 6, 2012 by

A short blog today because it’s just too pretty to stay inside and work! 61 degrees and clear here on the coast of Maine, with a high today of about 75.

Well, I’ve been struggling with trying to make an epub (the silk purse) into a mobi (the sow’s ear) for months.  I know Kindle Preview/Kindlegen is the Amazon prefered way and I have already had one mobi file (made by Calibre) refused by Amazon (which they are threatening to do with all Calibre-built mobis), but I just can’t get the output that I want through Kindle Previewer/Kindlegen.

The trouble is in the “Center” style in the original Word document which goes through so many permutations before it gets to anyone!  When I build a style in Word it asks for what Style the new Style is based on (I normally say… Normal) and also the style that will be following it. Again I say Normal, because that’s, well… normally the case.  I’ve noticed though that unless blocks of text are Styled together in this “Center” style… the next line of text (outside the block) drops its style off unless it is actually styled ‘Normal’.  Does this make sense to you?

Example:   Center:  3 lines of a very nice review.  Then I go back and pick up the next line which happens to be a title… so I style it also as ‘Center’ but with a little futz to the font size and line spacing and in Word it’s fine, in Calibre Epub it’s fine, in a Calibre Mobi file it’s fine… but in the epub-generated Kindlegen Mobi, that style reverts to ‘Normal’ obviously following the instructions in the original ‘Center’ Style… following style – Normal… and ignoring that this title is also styled ‘Center’.  At least I think that’s the problem, because the wonkiness seems to be centering around this ‘Center’ style issue.

Needs more experimentation, yes?  I’ll let you know.  This issue needs to be solved ASAP before Amazon truly decides that it’s their way or the highway!

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Vook, a new distributor and other ebook musings

Posted on June 27, 2012 by

So, I was reading my Publishers Weekly last week and ran across a big add for Vook. Have you heard of them? They’re a new company like Smashwords: you upload a Word doc or docx or an epub file and they convert it for you and then distribute it, royalty free to Apple, B&N and Amazon. Sounds good but it’s not really free… you pay a subscription to use the service. The one book package starts at $99. Check them out yourself by going to Vook.com.

I looked into this because it sounded like they were somehow affiliated with Publishers Weekly… but I’m not sure about that. Most of my clients upload to Smashwords who doesn’t charge a fee, but does take a cut (5% I think), so if you were selling a lot of one of your titles, Vook might work for you. On reading their instructions (Vook), I was pretty confused about how they wanted you to format your Word document though… really confused. In fact it went against everything that I have learned about constructing a good-looking document in Word. I guess I need to see one of their books because the examples that they showed to illustrate things like Titles was truly awful. But I have my methods, they’ve worked for me for a long time, and I’m sticking with them. And although I do give my clients a Word ‘doc’ for Smashwords, it’s very simply and specifically formatted so that it makes it’s way through Smash’s ‘meatgrinder’ unscathed. The epub and mobi/Kindle formats I build with an HTML file… so much more control over your output that way.

I guess I’m talking about this today because I’m concerned about the quality of the ebooks that I’m seeing lately. Quite a few just don’t look very good. All the words are there (or most of them are anyway), but they just aren’t very attractive… big honkin’ fonts, strange margins, odd image formatting, stuff like that. Of course the biggest offenders are the books converted by the New York publishers. I think they just try to get as many ebooks up as they can as fast as they can. Last night I started a book by one of my favorite authors, big publisher, very disappointed in the look of the book. In fact, although I bought it at the Kindle store specifically for my Kindle Fire, after a few pages I switched to reading it on my iPad because the story is just so freakin’ good, as are all of his books, even though the iPad isn’t very comfortable for reading in bed. For some reason it just looked better on the iPad, maybe because the font size coding in the book just wasn’t working on the Kindle Fire but did work in the ‘Pad.

You know, I don’t think of myself as a formatter anymore, but as an Ebook Designer. I’m striving to get my proofing perfect, but I still find that I overlook some words and punctuation even when I run that document through SpellCheck one more time, and I have my SpellCheck set so it finds everything. Just today, I went back over a book, a big book, and found two dropped periods, one beginning quote which should have been an end quote and upon instead of up on.  That actually was a new one. Usually I’m looking for clown instead of down, or but instead of hut! Now that was a funny proofing error… the sentence had the heroine putting a notebook in her but instead of in her hut… a real story changer. Reminds me of what happened on The University of Texas School of Public (Pubic) Affairs Commencement program. Proofing is hard, and getting it perfect is just about impossible. After reading 120,000 words twice, your brain and your eyes start to battle for superiority… You eyes see one thing, but your brain (the dominant member of this partnership) just knows it’s something entirely different. What’s a girl to do… as a last resort, run it through SpellCheck… just one more time!

But to get back to Ebook Design, I think that ebooks should be as attractive as print books. Clear fonts, crisp images, small images for book excerpts, flourishes which look especially nice in Regencies. Some authors are beginning to use small line drawings as scene change markers as well as beautiful line work as borders above and below titles and other elements to set them apart. I really enjoy doing flourishes. I did a blood splatter for one of my clients and found that if I converted the ‘jpg’ mage to a ‘gif’ image with color fill (red of course) but no outline then it wouldn’t have that pesky white box around it in Kindle when you have your screen set on Sepia. That just drives me nuts. Epubs don’t react that way, no white box no matter what color you make your screen. So if any of you write Vampire novels, call me and I’ll do some flowing blood for you!

And in closing, I just have to give out a big Thank You to my fellow formatter and a fabulous author, Lori Devoti. She showed me how to save the italics during a nuclear purge… what an incredible time-saver.  Go check out her books such as The Witch Thief and Trust Me, they’re wonderful. And don’t forget novels by her alter-ego, Rae Davies, such as Loose Screw and Cut Loose, Dusty Deals Mysteries.

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