I have just turned loose my first E-book…the first installment of my Revisiting Scripture material. I focus on the content at the Revisiting Scripture site, but here I want to share a few of the unexpected challenges.
Formatting in WORD: here my several-decade infatuation with styles has paid off, since I automatically used the hierarchy of HEADINGS and a consistent style for body text and for Scripture quotations. I was pleased to discover that at least as early as 2003 WORD included features to save as files in html format and to create a table of contents with links instead of page numbers.
Editing: WORD was very useful for the spelling and grammar checks. Just for this final edit I turned on the passive voice and gender detection. I am usually driven crazy by the first one, but I decided my prose should be more dynamic even if it meant re-phrasing in 100 places! The latter is not a burning issue for me but it did encourage me to replace “mankind” with “humanity”—a reasonable change. The biggest help was the meticulous editing of my wife who inserted a few commas, added a few, “I don’t understand” notes in places where I could easily expand and clarify, and encouraged me to cut out a few specific references where I had been especially cutting…my goal is not to attack but rather encourage folks of all sorts to revisit both Scripture and their beliefs in a non-threatening setting.
Getting started in Kindle: I have been playing with their free Kindle Previewer for weeks and the latest version (2.71) seems to be seriously flawed…it doesn’t really show what should happen on their new paperwhite viewer. It proves to me that the Kindle staff are not quickly responsive like the IPage folks were when I started up these blogs.
I did find I had left some links buried in my text. I confess…they were there because I cut and pasted material…just a little bit…from the web. I did rephrase it and modify it, as well as leaving credits, but lurking under some of those words were links which showed up on Kindle as underlines. I finally discovered that I could clean them out in the original WORD document by highlighting them and using ctrl shift F9. It seems well worthwhile to spend an additional hour carefully going over the final result before converting the draft to the final save.
I finally discovered that I could load the cover picture separately and the system puts it with the text file automatically…no need to somehow manually fit the pieces together before uploading. Later, after I had filled in, to the best of my ability, the blanks, the system beat me over the head with a warning that there was something wrong and it is shown in red…not a sign of red anywhere except in the warning message! It turned out I had failed to enter a contributor…perhaps I thought it was the name of a donor or it was what someone calls a senior moment. The actual upload was anticlimactic.
Now I am sitting waiting for the final approval by Kindle that releases it for sale!