I'll Be Seeing You Now Available

One backlist down and more to come.

My first experience self publishing my backlist works with Amazon Kindle was, aptly put…an experience. The Kindle text conversion process has a tendency to do weird things to your original formatting, how much or how little seems to depend upon what type of file you upload.

I first uploaded my original Microsoft Word.doc. On the sample book preview I received back from them, I found that a lot of my paragraph indents were missing, one line ran into the next making conversations, especially with short sentences difficult for the reader to follow. Along with several other problems. In chapter IV, there were a couple of paragraphs that showed up with a totally different font. What? How did that happen? While I was aware that converting to different ebook systems can cause formatting problems, there were too many to just let go.

So back to the drawing board. I reformatted my book as a html document and went back through, comparing it to the book preview I’d received from Kindle, correcting all the indent and spacing problems I could find. The paragraphs with the different font change, there was nothing I could do. My document was all in Times New Roman font. Unfortunately, once you send a book to publish, it is out of your control in Never, Never Land until the process is complete and the book goes live.

Once it went live, hoping no copies were purchased with all the formatting errors, I immediately uploaded the revised html version, keeping my fingers crossed that this would correct the problems, sending it back into Never, Never Land, waiting until the Publish process was complete.

About 36 hours later, I’ll Be Seeing You again went live. I received a preview copy. Yea! All the paragraph indents were there, a few other minor problems were corrected. It looked much better…except… On this version, all the spacing between the chapter headings were no longer there. All the text seemed to run together. And the different font on the two paragraphs in Chapter IV was still there.

So do I let it go this time hoping the readers won’t have a problem with the less than obvious chapter changes? A fairly easy issue to correct. If I were to center the chapter heading and make it bold, it would be easier for the reader to recognize the new chapter.

If there is a problem with my work, put out there for readers to purchase, if there is anything I can do to make it a better reading experience, I can’t just let it go.

While I’ll Be Seeing You is now available to purchase in the last corrected version, it is now back to Never, Never Land for the next 24 to 48 hours for the hopefully improved version with the changed chapter headings.

There is a real learning curve here. Learning what works. What doesn’t. What blips and bloopers you can do nothing about, such as the weird font change. I’ve learned a lot from my first attempt at Kindle publishing. Lessons learned for formatting the next book. Hopefully that one will be to my satisfaction on the first upload.

So, for you ebook readers out there. Please be kind. Understand that while you might find some formatting errors in the books you purchase, most of them are caused by converting the author’s work from one system to the next. It is not from the authors’ lack of trying to give you the best quality work possible. Some things are simply out of their control.