Wherein I Roll My Own in the Publishing House Line

Discussion in 'Self-Publishing' started by Catrin Lewis, Jul 6, 2016.

  1. NigeTheHat

    NigeTheHat Contributor Contributor

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    Amazon list all Kindle books under ASIN, regardless of whether there's an ISBN or not, so you don't need to worry about that.

    This is most likely a styles issue. I believe that's how Kindle works out what to use in the TOC.


    You're doing good. Most people who try to publish stuff - let alone set up their own publishing house - never even get this far, and everything you're learning now will make it easier for the next books. I checked out your listing, it looks professional. You've done a good job there.
     
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  2. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    I just found a thing called KDP jumpstart which is a series of videos and instructions on how to do everything in KDP both print and e.... (someone on SPF recommended that in a conversation about the difference between KDP and create space) Christ knows why that's not linked from the amazon help.

    https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202187740
     
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  3. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    I was surprised, actually, that my whole ms file, graphics and all, came in at 0.9 MB. So it's all good.
     
  4. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    Thanks.

    The style is the same for all of them . . . what's more likely is that I did something in the second half HTML that I didn't do in the first. Or vice versa. At least, I hope it's something obvious.

    Not looking at it tonight, though. I was on the road for 13.5 hours today and I am knackered.
     
  5. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    Checking in. I made a dog's dinner of my launch on the 24th. I seriously did.

    My own fault: I tried to do too much, running up to the deadline. I don't mean the 16 hours straight I spent on the final proofread; that was needed and picked up some mistakes and plugged a final plot hole or two. I mean deciding three hours out that things were going so well, maybe I could get my website activated so the in-book links would work right off the bat (I couldn't, but it ate a lot of time trying). Inserting "hidden" HTML so my Table of Contents would pick up on the title, dedication, and epigraph pages. Trying to figure out what it means to "host" the fonts I figured it'd be cool to use for my headings, so the ebook could match the print book after all.

    Forty minutes out, I had a version that, minus functioning Twitter and Pinterest buttons, looked really good on the KDP website's previewer. The special fonts I wanted were even there, without hosting them anywhere other than my own computer. But wouldn't it be nice, even necessary, to give the designer credit? I mean, he's sporting enough to allow it to be used for free, even for commercial use.

    So back in I go to add a line or two on the copyright page about the heading fonts. (I designed the other one, and gave myself credit, too.) And apparently I did something else to the file that I was too sleepy and too visually-impaired to realize I was doing, because when I uploaded the amended version at seven minutes out, the title page and my division and chapter heads were all spread out, sitting way down the page.

    Had to try to correct it. When the deadline hit, it was weird; another two-day clock started counting down at the top of my Bookshelf. That gave me hope. At 6 minutes after deadline I hit Publish (I thought) on a version with the title, etc., and author name on the same page, and the chapter, etc., heads a little farther up, though not enough. And hooray, it went through. I thought.

    Even so, I wasn't totally happy, and I had a theory I had to test about why everything was getting stretched out the way it was. But I wasted time trying to find out about the new countdown clock, and by the time I tried to upload and publish an improved version, it was 24 minutes after and the file was locked.

    Disappointing. Enough so that I told my friends on social media not to pre-order the novel, because they'd be stuck with a book that looked bad.

    But it got worse: when the book went live early on the 24th, I discovered that the version I'd hit Publish on on the 20th hadn't registered at all, it was the preliminary version I uploaded on August 3rd! Complete with uncorrected typos, erroneously-deleted lines, and without the last-minute edits.

    So instead of going on social media and joyfully announcing that the book at last was live, I was frantically telling my friends and supporters to keep holding off on buying it, that I would leave the lower presale price on until after I got the revised version up.

    What a mess. A version with the headings in the right places and working links is up now. I wish I knew how it looks for real; the Look Inside is so different from what you get on the KDP previewer.

    As for what happened that the semi-revised version didn't publish on the 20th, it was likely a combination of my dinky laptop screen, my confusion over how the Amazon-KDP page works, and my literally seeing double. Yeah, I hit Publish when it came to the book's content. But it looks like I missed the bit where you have to go over the pricing again. That kind of disappeared off the monitor to the right. And I might not have seen it if it had been flashing neon in front of me.

    So now I'm worried that Amazon is mad at me for not hitting my presale deadline, but not worried enough to take time away from the marketing stuff I have to do to go grovel before them.

    The Single Eye is out in the world now, all my blundering aside. If anyone is wondering, I did get a few pre-sales. And some since it went live. Not as many as I was expecting from the way people were commenting, which is disappointing. But I'm going to see how it builds and avoid checking my reports more than once a week or so.

    Or should I be slavishly following my numbers and my ranking? I can't see it. Who's got the time?
     
  6. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you've still got formatting errors wherein the first four words of each section are tiny ... see below catrin.png

    I also hate to say I told you so by you could have avoided all this grief by using a formatting tool instead of trying to code the HTML yourself
     
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  7. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    Yeah, I do all the formatting with styles in LibreOffice, then export it as HTML and use a custom .css file to convert the LibreOffice styles to ebook styles. But I've never tried to stuff images into books as well as text (except for the cover image, anyway).
     
  8. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    Yes. As far as I can see, the only real benefit of an ISBN on Amazon is that you can search for the book by ISBN as well as title.
     
  9. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    No, I need to know. And as I've said before, I wasn't then and am not now able to afford the formatting tools you speak of.

    Anyway, was that in the Look Inside or in the actual version?

    I know the small caps were tiny like that on the Look Inside for the interim version I uploaded a day or so after the book went live. I corrected it (or I thought I did) for the final. It looked great, just as I wanted it to--- on the KDP previewer anyway.

    At the moment I can get the current Look Inside only on my phone, as both my computers keep loading the original page. That appears as the screenshot you posted. On my phone's LITB I have no small caps at all, just lower case letters in a slightly larger font.

    Even though it seems weird to do it, it looks like I should buy a copy of my own book and see for myself. All I have is the Kindle app installed on my computers, but I guess it'll give me some idea.
     
  10. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    That's on the look inside , as viewed from my work laptop which hadn't looked at it before.. I've bought it but not yet read it so I can't tell you whether its the same on the full version.

    (on the formatting thing you could have done it for free on D2D or on amazons own creator... hell I'd have run it through vellum for you if you'd sent me a docx … I still can if you can't resolve the formatting any other way)
     
  11. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    Do you have the Kindle Previewer app on your PC? You can load in various types of file and have it convert to Kindle format, then display it as it would on different devices.

    That was the only way I could figure out--by trial and error--why my books looked perfect on everything except an iPad.
     
  12. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    One of the advantages of vellum is that it can show you what it will look like on a range of devices in program .. admittedly its a ball clenching £220 with vat … but I've published three and have another 5 in various stages of progress with more planned so I see it as an investment - if I do ten books that's only £22 each.
     
  13. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    Yeah, that's the version I threw up there as a .mobi file to at least get the proofreading corrections up. It should be gone, replaced by the version I can see on my phone, but on the computers it stays and stays.

    The up-to-date version is the one where the first dedication is to my mom.
     
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  14. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    I would definitely buy your own copy - you need to be SURE of what readers are getting.
     
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  15. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    OK. From the outside, it seems like a cheesy thing to do. From the inside, I can see it's just plain business.

    So I've done it.

    Though the sun is setting and if I look at the book now, the lawn will never get mowed. Bye!
     
  16. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    Bought it and looked at it on my phone. Looks much better than the Look Inside (which I'm told can take as long as a week to update). I found 2 or 3 typos I missed and the paragraph indent should be bigger, but that's easily fixed. The headings and the small caps at the start of the paragraphs look good.

    I'll take care of all that and issue an update when I publish the paperback version, hopefully by the end of this month. Though with the shift to all-KDP for print, it may take longer.
     
  17. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    Oh, yeah, I have it. There were definite differences between what the book looked like on it, and what it looks like for real.
     
  18. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    Two weeks since I uploaded the version with updated formatting, and my two PCs are still showing the old Look Inside. I get the correct one on my new smartphone, but what good is that if what I see on my PC is what potential readers see on theirs?

    I have sent Amazon KDP a message. Hope they have some good ideas.
     
  19. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    Its to do with the way a kindle file is constructed - its like a small file inside a large one, and the look inside cues off the small one and caches so it doesn't update straight away. Two weeks is a bit excessive though (Darkest storm isn't showing a look inside at all currently, which I don't understand - I shall give it a few days before I kick KDP)
     
  20. Carriage Return

    Carriage Return Member

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    Last edited: Dec 31, 2018
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  21. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    I'd started to do a post on the progress I'm making on getting the paperback version of The Single Eye to press, particularly what I'm up to on the wraparound cover.

    But tonight I learned something rather alarming, something all of us self-publishers should be aware of and likely aren't. I mean, nobody ever mentioned it to me.

    It's this, from Amazon's page entitled "Send Updated eBook Content to Customers":

    You can change your eBook at any time and republish the updated version. Customers who bought your eBook before you changed it keep the original version. If you corrected serious errors in your eBook and want us to notify customers of your updates and send them the latest version, you need to contact us. Before contacting us, please consider the following:

    • We only send customers updates to serious quality issues. Sending customers updated content may erase notes or highlights they entered, so the improvements must outweigh the disadvantages. We won't accept your request if you:
      • Added, deleted, or changed words, sentences, pages, chapters, or images.
      • Changed a character's name or your eBook's plot.
      • Added, deleted, or changed links or marketing information
      • Made significant changes that warrant a new edition.
    • Check your entire eBook. Make sure you've corrected all errors.
    • Gather all the information we need. You need to send us the ASIN, detailed examples of the corrections you made, and the Kindle location number. Location numbers are the digital equivalent of physical page numbers and provide a way to easily reference a place in your reading material regardless of font size.
    And so on.

    Good grief. Everybody I read online said one of the advantages of self-publishing was that you could make corrections whenever you wanted and put the new version up. The implication was that those who bought your book before the corrections were made would get the new version automatically.

    That's the impression I got. It involved readers getting an email or something directing them to "sideload" the new version, but again, I thought it was automatic.

    And yes, I knew that those who bought the preorder version were stuck with it, but I thought it was different for those who bought the book after it went live.

    So a week ago I uploaded an updated version that corrected some punctuation issues I'd missed and remediated some formatting problems like the one with the small caps that @big soft moose drew my attention to above. And yeah, I may have changed a word or a sentence or two in the front matter, but we won't say anything about that, no.

    By Saturday, when I checked, the new version was up on the Look Inside (though I just checked, and rot it, not the second one I submitted, after I discovered an editorial ghost in that same front matter). But I didn't have the new version on my Kindle app.

    Well, it hit me that I'd read something on the KDP Community board about authors needing to contact Amazon to ask them to push out the changes, as the expression goes. So Monday I found a thread there asking how to download an updated copy of one's book and chimed in.

    The same evening, I'd tripped over the page where you manage your own Kindle content and seen that three of the books I own were listed with "Update Available" buttons. So on the KDP Community thread I asked, should I ask Amazon to provide my buyers with that button at the same time I request them to push the changed version to me?

    Today one of the members responded with the link to the page above, stating that I should have known to look for the information on the Amazon Help pages already.


    No. I did not. I never imagined such rules existed. So yeah, I guess you can update your book whenever. And your previous buyers can get the updates--- maybe--- if Amazon deems them serious enough in one way and not serious enough in another. And if you jump through a lot of hoops, such as telling them what and where all the changes were. And they don't involve anything on the no-no list I quoted above. (So when it comes to corrections like untangling the Diogenes/Demosthenes confusion that @Lew had to do in his eBook, who knows if Amazon will send me an update link.) In my message to them I asked them just to update my copy of my own book, because the requirements aren't so strict for that.

    The moral of this story? Make jolly sure you're ready to hit Publish. If you say, "Oh, I can add that one thing or straighten out this other thing later," be sure it's something your early purchasers can do without. Because they ain't gonna get it without you putting some real work.
     
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  22. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    I already knew that, but in reality is it really that big a problem ? The strength lies in the ease of updating the manuscript so that new purchasers do not see the same errors (or whatever) as reported, and in changing covers (for future sales) when ever you want etc ... the reader who has already paid money for your book isn't the audience for new changes, unless you specifically want to send them a file
     
  23. Carriage Return

    Carriage Return Member

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    Last edited: Dec 31, 2018
  24. Lew

    Lew Contributor Contributor

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    It was news to me that Amazon would redistribute changes to those who already purchased it. Nice to know, if I ever make the mistake that @Catrin Lewis menitoned, but fortunately no one ever seems to have noticed except one eagle-eyed person... who earned a paying slot as @K McIntyre's editor for catching it!
     
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  25. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    It's my conscience, really. It doesn't seem fair for the early purchasers not to have the latest and best version of the book.

    Or in the case of folks like you, sir, I like to prove I corrected the formatting glitches you were on me about!

    (BTW, congrats on the shoutout Joanna Penn gave you on her podcast the time before last.)
     

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