Monday, October 30, 2017

And so the journey begins...!!


Going into the conference I attended in Denver, I wanted to take something with me to hand out that had book info and publication dates. That meant I had to actually choose dates. So the big day (finally) is:

 THANKSGIVING!!!

Yep, I figured the long weekend would be good for two reasons. I would be home to troubleshoot any possible issues. And--long lazy weekend for readers to be home to buy the books and actually have time to read them. :0)

So now guess what I'm in the process of doing?

1) Finalizing all edits from my proofreader/content editor for books 1 through 4.
2) Organizing all the individual documents that make up a book: title pages, copyright pages, dedication pages, about the author pages, etc....
3) Compiling the documents out of my writing program, Scrivener, and into an EPUB file format.

And that's where I ran into trouble this weekend. Book 1 looked fine. Book 2 looked fine, but it didn't match book 1 exactly. The book/author info across the top of the screen when I previewed the book in the Kindle Previewer was different, so I had to research how / where to change that. Also Book 2's paragraphs weren't indented for easier reading, so yet more research.

I figured out definitively how to change the info that appears at the top of each page. Yay me!

I did not figure out why I had no idents in the compiled file of Book 2 even though the actual pages in the program are indented. Harrumph!! The only think I can think of is that I probably used two different templates. Of course, I have no idea which two. But as I was reading and researching in the help file, I learned about some really helpful features of Scrivener, sooo...the project de jour is creating a custom template and setting everything up the way I want it.

Once that's done, I'll have to manually transfer each book, chapter by chapter, into a new file based on the custom template, and that should provide me uniformly formatted/compiled ebook files.

That's the theory anyway. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Back to the salt mines.




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