Sunday, September 4, 2011

Things I'm Learning About Formatting Books For E-Publishing

1) Transferring a ms from HTML to Word will remove all italics and paragraph indentations.
2) Publishing in HTML for Kindle means your ms will be in HTML, regardless of what the instructions on Amazon say about it.
3) Publishing for Kindle in Word works.
4) Transferring a ms from Appleworks to Pages (in order to avoid spending hours at Max's house fixing the italics problems created by transferring from HTML to Word and -- I hope -- to be able to publish to Kindle from my own computer) maintains the paragraph indentations and italics but removes all double spaces between sections and randomly splits paragraphs into two or three new parts for no apparent reason.  It also removes all instances of centering.

I really hope I can soon add in that I learned that e-publishing from Pages to Kindle is just as easy as the directions make it sound.  Keep your fingers crossed for that one, okay?

UPDATE 9/5/11:
5) Pages purchased before 2010 does not have ePub.
6) Pages '09 can transfer to PDF and Word.
7) Transferring Pages to Word to Kindle will remove all paragraphing and all italics.
8) Transferring Pages to PDF to Kindle will remove all centering, about half of the paragraphing indentations, and most of my sanity.
9) Kindle SAYS rtf works fine, but it doesn't.  It doesn't even upload.
10) Hours and hours of fixing errors and trying and failing time and time again makes you really tired.

2 comments:

  1. Good luck and let me know if you still need my computer sometime next week.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Stay tuned for further details.
    I'm re-reading the ms (YET AGAIN) to fix all the paragraphs and spacing. I did manage to put in page breaks and make a linked table of contents, though. (Go, me.)

    ReplyDelete