Tag: CreateSpace

Blue Daunia Issue #2, and Free Issue #1!

After a three day delay, Issue #2 of the Blue Daunia series is finally available on Kindle, and will be available in paperback on Amazon and CreateSpace very soon.

Screen Shot 2017-09-18 at 9.20.25 PM

I have to admit, I’m proud of this powerful cover image, courtesy of Donna Chiofolo Photography.  There’s just something about a lone seagull amidst stormy clouds that really captures the feeling of hopelessness in what I consider a gripping last chapter in this issue, if I do say so myself (which I certainly seem to do).

Also, from now until September 22 (2017), the inaugural issue of the series can be had on the Kindle store for FREE!  It’s hard to beat free reads.

I would like to take a moment to apologize for my absence of late.  I think it’s been a week or more since I’ve posted anything to my blogsite.  This is not from any sort of disinterest in my followers or potential future followers. . . on the contrary, I’ve had a heck of a crunch-time this past week trying to make the deadline and polish a quality product on Issue #2.  They say honesty is the best policy, and that’s the honest truth. . . a deadline paired with a day job is not a fun combination, especially when you allow yourself to get behind in that deadline goal.  So, my many apologies, and Happy Reading & Writing, all!

Stop Hitting That Tab Key. . . NOW!

So you’re writing and editing to digitally prepare and submit a manuscript for your first-ever book-baby.  Well, it might surprise you to know that there is one crucial thing you may very well be doing completely wrong!

If you’ve gotten in the habit, over the years, of hitting the tab key to indent your paragraphs, stop it, and stop it now!

As I’ve stated on my “Ahoy!” page, I’m here to report any mistakes I make in this ongoing learning process, as I make them.  And here I am. . . because for over twenty years, I’ve been hitting that trusty ol’ TAB key to indent my paragraphs.

So, why is this a mistake?  What’s wrong with it?  Aren’t most word-processors set up from the get-go for their tab-key results to indent paragraphs properly?

Well, in a word, no.

The tab key is set up for “tabulating” tables and columns.  From the Wikipedia:  “In word processing and text editing the Tab key will often move the insertion point to the next tab stop in a table, or may insert the ASCII tab character or many space characters.”

Sure, if you’re just printing out a chapter or three of your story, or looking at it on the screen, the indentations created by the tab key will look dead-on correct. . . all nice and professional-looking.

But the problem comes in when you submit a novel or novella that has been “tabbed” within an inch of its life.  Even if you submit a PDF to an online publisher (such as CreateSpace or SmashWords), they still have to do their own formatting, and tab indents can often choke their conversion programs.

Oh, it may still go through, but when you proof it, it will probably look like the first lines of your paragraphs start all the way an entire half of the page over!  It took me a bit of research and playing around with a few different word processors to figure out why my proofs were looking like this, and how to fix them (because I have been, for my entire life, a tab indenter).

So, as you’re blazing along through your first draft, pounding out paragraph after paragraph, get your fingers off of that tab key!  Try this instead:  Move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen, and, depending on the program you’re using, look for a tab called “format” or “formatting” or something along those lines, and in the menu for that tab, look for “paragraph” or “indentations.”  Set the field to read “0.5” (as in inches).  This should, theoretically, set things up to where you don’t have to do anything at all at the start of the new paragraph. . . just hit “enter” when you’re done with a paragraph and the next line should be automatically indented for you.

In Scrivener, if you’ve copied and pasted a body of text in which you have previously used tabs, you can select “Format > Convert > Strip Leading Tabs” to get rid of all of those unholy tabs at once, then press “command”+”a” to highlight the entire text, and go to “Format > Text > Tabs and Indents” to set all those now-missing tabs to 0.5″ indentations.  Voila!

The result of proper indentation will be a text that will compile correctly, convert to other word-processing programs correctly, and basically just save yourself time, effort and headaches on down the road.  Your PDFs and digi-publisher proofs will look, for the lack of a better word, “correct.”  You’ll smile, because you’ve made something that looks and “feels” professional. . . as opposed to lines that start somewhere off in the bedroom closet instead of roughly 5 characters over.

KDP Woes Lead to. . . CreateSpace! (Same Company, Different Name and Results)

“If self-publishing were a video game, I would have broken the controller.”

I tried a hopeful experiment today:  uploading a Scrivener-formatted PDF of Blue Daunia Issue #1 to Kindle Direct Publishing (henceforth referred to as KDP), for the purposes of creating a print-on-demand paperback.

Scrivener compiled the text beautifully, as I suspected it would.  The PDF looks quite professional, with every-other page of text shifted to the left of the page and every other page shifted to the right (as to create the “gutter” of the book).  The copyright page looks legitimate, as does the title page, acknowledgements, introduction, etc.

So I headed on over to the KDP website.  The metadata from the Kindle book was intact, and usable for the paperback as well (I really like this aspect of KDP), so the first step was to create a cover.  I’m pleased with the cover for the Kindle edition, but it just so happens that paperbacks also have a back cover as well as a spine!  No worries, though, since KDP has a CreateSpace cover designer for paperbacks as well as ebooks (CreateSpace itself an Amazon derivative).

I experimented with a few of the cover options, using the same awesome image from Donna Chiofolo Photography which the ebook cover incorporates.  I even managed to get the front cover looking fairly identical to the ebook cover.  The back cover was also a breeze to set up.

But the pleasantries end there, and the headaches begin.

Whenever I click on the “Preview” button after designing the cover, it sometimes loads.  It did so the first time.  But I wasn’t quite pleased with a few minor details (one just has to be a perfectionist when it comes to things like this), so I clicked the “X” or whatever they had, rather than hitting Chrome’s “page back” button.  I altered a few things, made some adjustments to the Title font and the font color of the back-cover blurbs, and hit “Preview” again.  I got the “loading” spinny-wheel for about three minutes.

I don’t have the patience for that sort of nonsense, but I didn’t want to mess anything up, so I waited.  Finally, after another three minutes (now a total of six), I got to see my preview.  I still wasn’t quite happy with a couple of minor quibbles.  So I Xed again, made the adjustments, hit “Preview” again. . . and an infinity of spinny-wheel ensued.  After a cup of coffee and a few YouTube videos, fifteen minutes had elapsed.  Spinny-wheel kept on spinning.  I felt I had no choice but to hit Chrome’s “back” arrow.

It went back to the cover editor fair enough, but damn if it didn’t take four or five tries to get a “Preview” back up on the screen again.  I know when it’s happening correctly because the correct procedure seems to only take roughly 15 seconds.

After the frustration of all of that, my cover was finally “Successfully Uploaded.”  Yay!  Next step, uploading the PDF file.  That was a breeze. . . sort-of.  Yes and no.  Ultimately no.  Let me explain.  No. . . no time to ‘splain.  Lemme sum up.

The uploading of the PDF file took all of 4 seconds, which seems about right.  Now, on the KDP website, once you’ve uploaded a file as the body of text for your paperback or your ebook, you get the same message below the “success” blurb:  “Formatting the File.  Your Preview Will Be Ready For Viewing Once We’ve Processed the File.”  Or something along those lines.  The idea being that the program they use gets everything converted and then you get to take a look and see what it will look like to your customers before you finally click that “submit” button.

For the Kindle ebook, this process of formatting took about a minute to a minute and a half.  Excellent. . . good on ya!  For a paperback, this takes understandably longer as you’re dealing with various selectable trim sizes which you must ensure match the trim size of the compiled PDF, and other technical things I as a writer don’t like to worry over as well.

But when you’re waiting for over an hour. . . and you spend that eternity googling whatever search terms you can think of to see if it should be taking this long, and you’re sifting through forums and you find one in a hundred where someone else has had the same problem. . . the blood tends to boil just a bit.

Now take that boiling blood frustration and add this little gem to the equation:  Finally, finally, the website says something different, other than the spinny-wheel of waiting.  And what does it say?  Why, “An Error Occurred During the Formatting Process, Please See Error Message For Details” of course!  Because why not?

And what exactly did the error message say?  Whatever it was, I could fix it.  I could go back into Scrivener and make any adjustments necessary, and have a new PDF within 5 to 10 minutes tops (5 seconds if you just count Scrivener churning out a compiled PDF. . . the added time is on me, as a user, making the adjustments).

This is what the error message said:  “Error.”  That’s it.  Just “Error.”  No buttons to click, no tiny little down-arrow to hover over. . . just “Error.”  What. . . the. . . .

Hey!  Ya know what, I’m a fairly upbeat guy when it comes to things like this (he lied).  And I’ve got nothing to do for the next few hours.  I’m gonna look over the PDF as well as all the Scrivener formatting tabs, compile a new PDF just for the halibut, and try this again.

Two. . . Hours. . . Later….

“Error.”

Okay.  It was a bad night to be a nearby blanket on the couch.  I picked that blanket up and stuffed it over my pie-hole and still screamed loud enough to get a few neighborhood dogs barking.  If self publishing were a video game, I would have broken the controller.

To be quite fair (and this is where I try to turn this post around, and hope that you as a reader will join me in not hating KDP), the “paperback” aspect of KDP. . . that whole side of it. . . is still in “beta” mode at the moment.  Granted, it has been there for nearly a year if not longer, but it is still openly a testing-stages thingamajig.

Amazon also owns CreateSpace, which, if you haven’t heard of, then you probably haven’t dreamed the airy dreams of self-publishing.  CreateSpace is known for it’s quality print-on-demand paperbacks.

I remembered this, suddenly, foolishly, dawningly (I just invented a word!), and I went there, to that mighty CreateSpace, and things seem to be going much better now.

It’s still a work-in-progress, because they have actual flesh and blood human-peoples looking over your PDF or whatnot, making sure everything is good to go, and tell you flat-out (or up-front, or other hyphenated words that sound immediate and open) that they will review your stuffs and respond to you within 24 hours during a business week.

Long story short (as if I haven’t surpassed that point in this post already), it looks like my dreams of holding a book I wrote in my hands. . . an actual paperback book with a barcode and a spine. . . might be coming true within a few days.

The moral of this lesson is as such:  If you have an ebook, and want a legitimate paperback copy of said ebook, go to CreateSpace, and not KDP (which is supposedly powered by. . . CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon, who owns KDP. . . or something).