My story ‘Send In’ is now available at Amazon! (You can still buy it direct from me as a PDF too.)
Getting it to the Kindle format was a challenge. Now, before you start reading how I did it and start trying it, note that after all this, I found I could have uploaded a word document and maybe that would have done all this work for me, but I didn’t know that at the time.
So I have the PDF, it’s nicely formatted, has some nice looking pages, etc. I put quite a bit of effort into making the page graphics look nice. If you printed it out, I hope it looks fantastic. But when I converted to HTML, all that went away (aside from the little rocket that notes scene breaks.) At first annoyance filled me like a cheap balloon on an overactive helium nozzle, so I decided I didn’t want to explode, so I got over it really fast. PDF is made for setting up pages. The Kindle format is made for putting words on a page that you can zoom in and out of. Both are good and have their distinct advantages, and some are mutually exclusive.
Once I got that figured out, I had to get the formatting right. All the text ran together, the paragraphs weren’t spaced right, it was a mess (I used Kindle for PC to test.) I tried using Find/Replace to add and remove HTML code I didn’t need, a friend offered to go though and work on it, and he did, but it still wasn’t working right (not his fault, that code was nuts!)
Then an idea hit my like a helium bottle whose overactive nozzle broke off and let the bottle fly through a glass window and right into my head! What if I took the text from the Word Document (with the scene break images) and pasted it into the WordPress visual text editor that I am typing to right now then clicked over to the HTML tab, and copied that into a new HTML file? I tried it.
It worked.
I had to fidget with the code to get the images to work right, but that wasn’t hard. I also had to add <body> tags and added the site’s CSS info at the top. Then I used the MobiPocket conversion tool to make it into the eBook .prc format, and uploaded to Amazon.
There might be some extra code in there, but it works, and I’m not running a program, so I’m not entirely concerned about it. Next time I’ll try uploading a Word doc and see what happens … it might be a whole lot easier.
I also noticed my cover image says ‘Send In Justin Lowmaster’, which is odd, and unintentional, and kinda funny (to me at least.)
I hope everyone who gets a copy enjoys it!
