It\u2019s been three years since I last published a story.<\/p>\n
My only excuse is very poor time management skills. A few months ago, I switched positions at work. Since then, I\u2019ve found myself sitting in front of my square headed girlfriend (aka computer screen) during most evenings.<\/p>\n
Not playing games, not looking up porn, not doing school work \u2013 I\u2019m writing new material and editing old.<\/p>\n
Writing and proofing is very cathartic for me.<\/p>\n
I managed to flesh out the next short story in the Ironspike Chronicles \u2013 Kishi. I\u2019ve actually be working on it for years and learned a few interesting things.<\/p>\n
For those of you who haven\u2019t travelled down the indie author road \u2013 writing is really half the battle. Just about anyone can craft a of piece literature. However, getting that piece of literature edited and published in the various digital formats – that my friend \u2013 is quite another story.<\/p>\n
When I jumped into indie publishing four years ago, basically only two main players existed for a market. Amazon which used the KF8 format (the Kindle) and Barns and Noble (the Nook) that used the Epub format. Let\u2019s not forget about any type of on-demand-presses that needed a PDF \u2013 for physical print books.<\/p>\n
I decided to get CS6 and use InDesign as my \u2018layout\u2019 software. It allowed me to export my books to the Epub format and Amazon provided a beta plugin to create *.mobi files. It took some time to figure out InDesign (mostly adult education classes). However, in the end I managed to craft what I thought was a good layout for my work and publish it to each format.<\/p>\n
When I finished writing and proofing BloodLoss \u2013 it was now time to work on publishing. A word processer (like MS-WORD) is not the same as a publishing software. The first task on my list was take all my finished work from my word files and get them into a \u2018book\u2019 in InDesign. Most on-demand print solutions just require a PDF file so my InDesign document was very basic. Copy in content from my word files. Then adjust items like color, fonts, and size \u2013 a click export to pdf \u2013 done! Of course I left out the cover creation process \u2013 that\u2019s a whole other beast.<\/p>\n
Now that my print version was complete \u2013 on to the Amazon format. I\u2019ll spare everyone a little heartache \u2013 amazon used to have command line level tools (kindlegen) to parse and verify your files. It required your work to be converted to HTML. I\u2019m sure all authors know how to format and set up their works using assets, css, html, images, and fonts all that good stuff. I\u2019ll avoid that topic and stick only with InDesign.<\/p>\n
When I took my InDesign project for on-demand-print and tried to generate an Amazon Mobi \u2013 no Bueno. That isn\u2019t entirely true, it\u2019ll try to create something \u2013 but it\u2019ll suck ass. Each format (epub, mobi, ibook) has its very own formatting conventions that handles table of contents, images, fonts, book marks, and over all flow.<\/p>\n
As an author, I want my work to make a great first impression. That requires top quality functionality that caters to the device it\u2019s read on. This effort required me to create three different sets of my work -one dedicated to print, epub and mobi. This allows me to tweak various aspects of each format without jacking up the other formats.<\/p>\n
Is the effort worth it?<\/p>\n
In my opinion \u2013 yes. \u00a0Is it a lot of work \u2013 yes.<\/p>\n
There might be easier ways to handle this aspect of being an indie author. If so, I\u2019m open to suggestions.<\/p>\n
Anyway, this article grew longer than I anticipated. My goal when I started this article was to explain as an indie author what I did four years ago vs what I\u2019m doing in the present when it comes to layout. Seems, I got side tracked explaining what happens after writing and moving into publishing. My next article I\u2019ll go over \u2018the now\u2019 aspect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My only excuse is very poor time management skills. A few months ago, I switched positions at work. Since then, I\u2019ve found myself sitting in front of my square headed girlfriend (aka computer screen) during most evenings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1932,"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions\/1932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bonesnap.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}