I felt courageous and clicked on the "look inside" my 3-day-old book,
Walk Forward, and noticed two conversion errors in the first 10% of the book. One word was repeated, and a hyphenated word did not convert correctly. I had read about the second error type, but not the first. I wish I did not have any errors in my first few chapters and am perplexed as to how the errors happened. Fixing them is simple, if one likes to format and convert files, but I have no plans to format in the near future, am seeing code in my sleep, and continue to search for any secrets to the process of ebook publishing!
When some of my paragraphs failed to indent, I could verify that code was missing, I saw the missing symbols, but no matter what I tried, I could not add the needed code. I finally had to alter my content to fit the formatting -- luckily, I am the author of the book and can add or delete content!
Many of you are formatting, please share any and all secret fixes, so that we might all save time!
Seems like a list of common errors observed after formatting or sending a file to be ground up, would be well received, certainly by this author!
Starting with plain HTML is my secret and made the process easier than those I read about. I had little manual labor to do, did not have to go through pages correcting code. I had no extraneous code in my manuscript. Using Open Office has some advantages and Word has others, but since I am not comfortable with the new Word program on my computer, I used Open Office and recommend it.
Breathing on a manuscript seems to propagate extraneous code, and holding one's breath, as I did, apparently makes some needed code mysteriously disappear!
There is much housekeeping to do the first days after publication for a single platform. I have not found
a "to do" list anywhere, but am finding out by the helpful hints of those reading
Walk Forward.
One reader emailed that she loved the book, would like to "like" my tags, but I have none!
Another told me she could not find me in "author central" -- maybe an issue per my maiden name?
Amazon prompted me for an RSS feed to my blogs, and I have no clue how to do, but will be reading about it in the wee hours of the morning!
I want to respond to the email and telephone calls I am receiving about the book. I am being asked "Rosa, where did you get all of those details?" -- the answer is that I was lucky that my mother kept a journal which I found after she died last year. Adding details to the stories I remembered was easy, as she wrote them down. This was long before I was serious about writing a book. It remains a very emotional process, because I miss her very much.
Summary, one can not do a half decent job if attacking all platforms at once. The housekeeping tasks are keeping me busy 24/7. I am glad that I am only on Amazon!
My book keeps moving from #6 to #4 and back again, in several of its categories, and I can not help scrolling back and forth between Amazon's incredible report module and my book's web page.
I highly recommend checking Amazon's incredible report module which includes statistics on my book in real time!
