Publishing an e-book has been an adventure. My first stop and what seemed the easiest was Amazon.com
When I thought I was on the last leg of my publishing trip I was, in reality, starting a new journey.
After writing, correcting, revising, re-reading, changing, re-correcting, re-revising, then creating a layout, checking styles, etc. etc. etc., a book, you would think it was done.
So I sent the book to be published at Kindle Direct Platform thinking it was a piece of cake. When I followed the instructions from Amazon they indicated that the best idea was to upload an html file. The problem is that they also instructed people to put all files for the book (html file pictures) in one folder and zip this folder.
When you save a document from Word to an html format it automatically creates a subfolder with all your pictures in it.
I thought if I moved the file into the folder with the picture all would be fine. Ok, what no-one tells you is that the path to the pictures inside the html file will be wrong if you do that. If you move the html file to be in the same folder as the pictures it cannot find them.
And because the only sample that you have of your final book is a horrible thingy that appears on a pop-up window, you have no idea how it is going to look! I just assumed that having followed all instructions it would be enough.
It wasn’t. It was horrible to see “my baby” published as it was: badly formatted with missing images.
I immediately took it off and started the adventure of finding a solution.
I am a writer, not an I.T. person, I have a good BASIC knowledge of softwares and stuff, therefore I had no idea what was wrong.
Amazon doesn’t help, they only sent me one of those “pre-prepared” e-mails. You don’t receive a sample of what your book is going to look like or anything.
First I found a way to see my book exactly how it was going to be published; a comment by a man named John:
http://forums.kindledirectpublishing.com/kdpforums/thread.jspa?messageID=47403뤫
It is a funny zip & zipping process. It worked.
Then I saw that the formatting was all wrong and the pictures not there yet. I even bought a Kindle to get myself into the e-book world.
Following I tried other formats to upload the book: pdf, doc, docx, mhtml, mobi, prc. I downloaded several e-book converters and readers.
The result was only one: disaster! Either the pictures were missing or the format was messy.
I wanted to cry.
When I was at the end of my limits I did what was left to do: I cried for help. And here comes a very handy facebook profile. I sent messages to friends and e-mails and asked for help on facebook.
My friend gave me the idea to Google the problem. Up to now I had been looking into Amazon forum for the answer.
At Google I found a website that was part of the solution:
http://www.cjs-easy-as-pie.com/p/about-kindle.html
But when I saw this tutorial I wanted to cry, at that moment I needed a solution to the pictures issue and that was all. I couldn’t even thinking of doing all that with the big issue fresh in my mind.
I tried the mobi converter to produce the document but the pictures still didn’t upload.
It was in a conversation with a very smart friend of mine that the solution was made obvious to me. He is what I called an assessor for all matters, he is one of those people that seems to know all about everything. He pointed out that if I moved the html pictures the path would be made invalid.
Then another friend helped me to transform a theoretical solution into a practical one. With a few minutes, some quick searches and the right computer knowledge this other friend sorted out how to correct the problem.
All you have to do is:
– Save your file as HTML, authomatically Word will create a subfolder with all your pictures in it.
– Move your file to the same folder where your pictures are.
– Then open the doc file with WordPad or any software that will read it as text, and search for the pictures’ names as they were put by Word in the folder.
– Re-write the path, the instruction to where your pictures are so the file can find them in the same folder as the text is.
For example, my pictures were named as image001, image002, etc.
My file was named “test file”
In my file the path to the pictures were:
src=”test_file/image001.jpg”
Meaning that the pictures were into a sub-folder called test_file.
All I did was take off that part of the instruction, leaving only the name of the picture instead:
src=” image001.jpg”
And it worked.
And suddenly, life was, once more, perfect. Knowing how to solve the pictures problem gave me the energy to go through C.J.’s tutorial, create a table of contents that would work, mark the start of the book, and prepare the file for Kindle.
John’s comment made possible for me to check if things were going the way they were suppose and at the end the book was sent!
“Fio da Meada” is a fictional novel based in real life. It is the story of a ghost that talks to a woman who lives in a faraway land. Itamar wakes up from his death to find himself following a ferry and having flashbacks of his life. He has humorous stories to tell and so does she.
The story follows his train of thought telling a story of family roots, the past and present, life in Brazil and in Australia.
This book is in Portuguese (Brazilian) and the first of many. I will shortly release it at Apple Store and possibly for Kobo. Then, the second novel, also in Portuguese, called “Simplesmente Gerva”. After that I will publish a book born Aussie: written in English.
If you have friends that read Portuguese, be kind by forwarding this information.
A few years from now you will be reading a best seller, or watching a movie or even a TV series and you will be saying you are friends with the writer of that story!
I will be able to say I have special regard for the people that were there at the beginning of this wonderful adventure…
Find the book here: www.amazon.com.au/dp/B007XAJOFM
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