**This post originally appeared on dvmulligan.com on 4/11/15**
Yesterday, I made The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing available for download. Unlike my novels, this book was not the result of years of sweat and tears, or at least writing it wasn't. The reflections in it are based on years of sweat and tears, but it only took about a month to write, edit, and format it. (It's 30,000 words, and several of the chapters are adapted from prior blog posts.)
What's more, I set aside my usual perfectionism because I had a strong sense of urgency I felt to say everything I needed to say about self-publishing right now, before the whole self-pub world changes again and leaves my advice and experiences obsolete. To the end, apologies for any typos. I hope they aren't too terrible. The book is basically like a long blog post, and though I did my best to proofread, I know there are going to be errors.
But it's not the typos that are driving me nuts now.
It's the fact that, despite meticulous and careful formatting to make sure all my bulleted and numbered lists look nice and are easy to read, to make sure chapter and subheadings are consistently formatted, to create an overall enjoyable book, strange things happen when my file is converted to an ebook, and there's little I can do about it.
For instance:
In the epub Smashwords version, some subheads are HUGE now and some chapter headings aren't any different from plain text. But in the Smashwords mobi version this didn't happen. Why? I don't know.
In the Kindle iPad version, all indent paragraphs became nonindented with gaps to indicate new paragraphs. But in the Kindle Kindle version that paragraphs look nicely indented just as they should. Why? I don't know.
It's infuriating because I followed both Smashwords and Kindle style and formatting guidelines to the letter. Sigh.
So I apologize if you, like me, are easily distracted by formatting issues when reading an ebook. I did my best. I think I'll eventually redo the Kindle one in InDesign to make a more polished file, but for now, we're stuck with an imperfect one. And isn't life like that?
And on that note, a poem (it is National Poetry Month after all) by the brilliant Kay Ryan:
We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It
The first fear
being drowning, the
ship’s first shape
was a raft, which
was hard to unflatten
after that didn’t
happen. It’s awkward
to have to do one’s
planning in extremis
in the early years –
so hard to hide later:
sleekening the hull,
making things
more gracious.
Image in this post used under the Creative Commons license.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turtle-raft-muenster-zoo-germany.jpg
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