Today’s post is going to be brief. Sorry about that. I’ve been editing and editing and editing some more. There are a lot of things being changed for the better, and I’m excited with the finished results. Lilia is becoming a less YA type main character and more like the twenty year-old she actually is, which is good. Also, I’m trying to figure out formatting and such — it’s such a pain, but I think my files are coming out fairly clean so far. Scrivener is a big help in that regard.
My plans for the week all involve more editing. There’s some minor touch-ups and some last-minute revisions that need to be completed, and then it’s hello world! Also, on Wednesday I’m posting some backstory about modified and the animal abilities the main protagonists have. Stay tuned for that, and I hope y’all have a great week (and that Monday wasn’t too-too painful).
Formatting? Really? I didn’t realize that would be so complicated. Let me know via email if I can help somehow.
I’m not a very technical person, so it’s been a little frustrating. The Kindle file keeps having a bunch of spaces between words sometimes. I’ve noticed this in a lot of other Kindle ebooks, so is this something that’s normal? Or something I’m doing wrong? (They’re not huge jumps between words, just maybe an extra two spaces or something like that).
Well, one thing to remember is it might be beneficial to take the document TEXT (NOT the formatting stuff) from a program like Notepad++ or even just Notepad and see if you can find anything like that. Turn it into an HTML file to help remove things like tabs (HTML doesn’t acknowledge those). Then put it back into Word/word processor to upload to Kindle.
For me, I like to turn it into text with Notepad++ (it’s free) and remove any extraneous mark-up or formatting code. Then I turn it into a .prc file before uploading it to Kindle. I’ve not had any problems, and I’ve had someone who owns a Kindle (I only have the app on my computer and phone and tablet) tell me it didn’t have any formatting issues.
Let me know if you need more help.
So…I use Scrivener, which outputs Kindle files automatically. I haven’t done this with my own book yet, as I prefer the ePub format iBooks for iPad uses, but eventually I’ll have to consider it. I read a fellow blogger’s book a while ago in Kindle format, and while the story was very good, the formatting was appalling. Every place where there were italics (and some entire chapters were like this), the words were entirely run together with no spaces. I can’t imagine she wrote it like this, so it clearly is something majorly wrong with how Kindle interprets standard input files. The best I can suggest is absolute and utter consistency in your formatting. Do a Find and Replace for every period-space-space and replace it with period-space. Make every straight quote a smart quote. Everything EXACTLY the same.
I don’t know what application you’re using for you final draft, but it might even be a good idea to save the whole thing as a Plain Text (.txt) file so there IS no formatting. Then turn it back into a Kindle format.
This is great advice. Thanks. I’ll definitely do that. Like I said to Darc, my file is so far fairly clean. It just has some strange extra spaces between certain words on the Kindle, and I’m not sure if that’s the result of my formatting or of the Kindle’s formatting because other ebooks have it as well.
Confusing.
By the way, ePub seems to work really well and looks beautiful in my iPad. Just saying!
Haha, I need to check my epub file and see if it’s clean. Since I have a Kindle it’s easier to check. But I have an iPhone so I guess that works, right?
100%. Check your book across as many platforms as possible. Check it on your Kindle, in the Kindle app for iPhone, in Kindle Desktop, in iBooks, in Stanza…the more formats and readers you check, the better an experience your readers are going to have.
I will definitely do that. I know someone who has an iPad and will let me view my ebook on it, so that’s nice. Covering all my options, yay!