eBook Technical Snags

Slow day on the eBook front.

I sat down and reviewed the Scrivener manual for the Macintosh.

• I've discovered that editing CSS style-sheets only works for screenplay manuscripts.
• I also hoped that I might be able to finesse opening paragraphs using some sort of trick with document headers, titles, notes or synopsis fields - but that means making a manuscript unusable for anything but ePub format.
• Finally, it turns out that our old Mac's hardware is PowerPC, not Intel-based; this means I can't save the manuscript for Amazon's Kindle.

Sigh. I'd sort of wanted to do all of this myself, but I'm beginning to think that I should use Smashwords because I'll have access to more formats and a easier time formatting the layout.

Cover Reworked

There. I think I've managed to get a clean design that says "Mask, Glass and Magic." And neither myself nor the camera are being reflected in the shiney bits. Much. 

Now to work on the title and credit placement...

First Attempt at Cover Photos

I started out with this. It's wrong because the image says, "Tea!"  Which would be fine, except the story isn't about tea.  Also, the title is too small and the author's name is way too small.






So it was time to work on a new cover. One that said, "Mask Glass Magic!"  I had a design idea, so I assembled the appropriate Visually Interesting Props. 





I fiddled around with the shadow theatre. And this photo says "Theatre!" Or possibly "Shades of Milk and Honey."  The other question is, how does this look on a Kindle screen?






This was the image I was aiming for. I can see I'll have to try again. But, while it's a cool image, it's also a confusing one seen up close and I should look at it through a black and white filter to get a feel for how it would translate to the Kindle or Nook.  It's possible I'd get more mileage if it were zoomed in really close.







Well. It says "Mask" and it says "Glass." I think it also screams "Amature!"  And, looking at this again after a rest, it also says, "Shampoo."  Sigh.  Back to photographing -- good thing the camera batteries are recharged.

Oh. Writing. Right, back to writing....

Making an eBook Cover

I had an idea for the cover art for "Mask Glass Magic": We've got some small metallic mask decorations, and if I can fix them so that two reflect each other it would look cool and relate to the story. So, it was time to set up a photo shoot.

Step one: Clear off the table. Euw, at least I know what we had for breakfast... and who was eating there... anyway. The next step is looking at the shadow theatre I made a few months ago.

Unfortunately, the shadow theatre's been a little beat up -- it's a cereal box, so it's been re-purprosed as a storage box, and the paper screen has some oil or food or something on it. I thought I could be lazy and use the old paper, but it looked more dirty than antique, and I ended up replacing it with new paper.

We have a lot of glass objects d'art in the house (I'm sure Mark has another name for them). I want to photograph the two masks in front of some stain glass that Mark's mother made. The trick is to make the photo interesting, but not cluttered. Must. Not. Arrange. Every. Glass. Object. In. The. House. Into. Picture.

I actually own some lampworking tools and I could... no, Mark would probably not appreciate me trying to photograph a live blowtorch flame in the house and I'd probably melt the plastic parts of my camera.

And, of course, after fourty-five minutes of gathering, cleaning, and repairing objects, I have an errand I have to go do.

I've returned! I arrange the masks, fastening them together with bits of Post-it Note. Unfortunately, the masks I want to work with make the photo look like flier for a Night at the Theatre. I take a couple of shots of mask shadows cast on the theatre. But the light's not right. Arg. Mask. Glass. How hard can this be?

I move to a darker part of the house where I can control the lighting. As I'm shooting I'm trying to remember that I'm going to want an image that divides horizontally into five sections. More prop-wiggling.

As I'm about to snap a photo that it approaching what I'd like the cover to look like, the camera batteries die.

OK. This probably a sign to go play with CSS.

Pictures later when my batteries have recharged.

Re-thinking Manuscript Format

Whew. Copy-editing is changing how I think about formatting.

When I turn stories in to the Wordos or send them to a professional market, they need to look like they came off of a typewriter from 1988. In other words, a mono-spaced typeface, double-spaced, with inch-margins. Straight-quotes, two spaces after a period. Underlines for italics, and other "before the world had LaserWriters" formatting involving dashes. It's how I've formatted stories for the last ten years.

Formatting for eBooks is different. In traditional publishing, there's usually a type-setter working on an author's professionally formatted manuscript before it becomes the hard-copy a reader holds. So I need to un-learn some formatting habits if I am going to be producing an end-product.

For example, when I use Scrivener, I need to take advantage of its export functions instead of forcing formatting options at the raw document level. I say this because it's a real pain -- even with a wonderful tool like Scrivener -- to go through a document and curl quotes that used to be straight.

At least with eBooks I don't have to specify gutter widths and pantone colors.

Copy Editing

I've been focusing on preparing the manuscript for Mask Glass Magic for ePub formatting.

The copy that I have is what I sent off to Writers of the Future back in 2006.  I stupidly did something with the galley copy that I okayed for the anthology and I wish I had hung onto it.  I can see all sorts of little usage things in my copy of the book that were fixed.  It appears I should re-read Fowler's Usage on hyphens.  And I don't want to re-write the story... but there are some places where word echos could be polished out.

Some of the expletives in my manuscript were toned down for the anthology; which is fine with me -- although it does raise the question of profanity use and portraying "edgy" characters.  Not that Michelle Horn was supposed to be that edgy, and the global word substitution probably made her a more sympathetic character.

I hope this doesn't come off as whiny, because I really appreciate the work whoever line-edited my manuscript did. 

First Foray Exporting an eBook

I'm beginning the process of releasing some of my stories to ePub format. Authors like Jay Lake, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Niomi Kritzer have released some of their short stories and novels for e-readers like the Nook and Kindle.  If I want to take advantage of indie publishing, it would be better to do it sooner, rather than later (and it appears I should have started six months ago), because it appears that eBooks now are at the cusp that web pages were in 1997.  If I don't establish a readership now, it will be exponentially harder to do so once everyone's grandparents and dogs are publishing.  (And yes, I intend to keep submitting to physical markets because there's something to be said for editorial filtering.)

Originally, I was going to release Mask Glass Magic, The View from the Top, Up, and a few non-professionally published stories in an anthology.   But I was persuaded by some Wordos to release each story as singles for ninety-nine cents and then offer a discount price anthology of all the works.

Luckily, I have a head-start with formatting because I've been using Scrivener.  I love Scrivener.  It's great for researching, outlining, and editing.   It's easy to break text up into sections, which helps me to focus on working on one scene at a time (instead of working and re-working a beginning).  Ease of sectioning off text makes it easy to deal with intruding chunks of other stories -- I can write what comes into my head, sequester it into its own section, and get back to the main story.   Scrivener remembers various manuscript formats: I have a default for Wordos Crititque, and a few others for the odd market that demands manuscripts be non-traditionally formatted.  And -- the important part for making an e-book --  Scrivener saves in ePub and other reader formats.

Creating a an ePub format file was pretty simple, especially after I watched this five minute YouTube Scrivener Tutorial. 

And then I ran into my first real snag.   I have no Kindle or Nook to double-check the formatting. The iMac we have is running older software, and the version of iTunes we have only plays audio books.   iTunes displayed the cover art I'd put together, but wouldn't open the book. What was interesting to notice was that the iTunes book cover looks like it wanted to be eleven by eight; I'd designed a cover with a photo that was more like five by eight.

I needed some sort of ePub reader. After skimming Ars Technia, I downloaded FBReader for Windows. With a little fiddling so FBreader knew where to find the ePub file, I opened up my test manuscript....

Uh, Wow. It's utilitarian. And it seems to be reading my manuscript backward? Or... no, I'm simply unused to the reader's interface.  And... okay, the reader is hyphenating the text depending on screen size.  Scrivener put in a table of contents that would be more useful if my first attempt had chapters or were an anthology.  My art looks okay, but the image -- an artsy photo of a tea infuser -- doesn't have much to do with the story -- a fantasy story set in modern Eugene. 

As Niomi points out in her blog, the reader, not the author/publisher controls the font face.  This is probably a good thing, because it will prevent type-face faux-paus (remember the mid-eighty's when the Macintosh let you print documents with Too Many Type-faces?  It wasn't pretty.)  But it makes formatting text to be slightly less catatonic a challenge.

It appears that there are some CSS tricks I can do to make the opening lines of sections more spiffy.  I would like to have the first letter in the first word be twice as large as a reader's normal font, and I'd like the first line to be SMALLCAPS.  Figuring out the CSS code for paragraphs will be the next step.

But there are a few questions I need to be clear about before I can start selling stories:

Can the Nook and Kindle can handle unicode 4.0 characters?  If yes, then I could use them for section breaks instead of blank spaces.

Where are the formatting controls in Scrivener again?  And what I'm doing is called galley work.  Which means I have to expand my notions of proper manuscript formatting and get used to seeing my prose with things like em-dashes, ellipses, and italics instead of double-single dashes, triple periods, and underlined text, respectively.  And, uh, whoa!  There's a missing word:  time to break out a paper copy and a red pen because I can't blame anyone else for production mistakes.

What's the best use of metadata.  If I want my books to sell, they need to be findable by search engines.  Metadata is where I put in tags and other search engine flags, and I need to make them work.  "John Burridge" would be one -- or should I put in my whole name so I don't have irate British soccer fans looking for Britain's Oldest Goalie.  "Fantasy" (at least for this story) is another.  But do I put in "Eugene, Oregon -- fiction" and "lampworking -- fiction"  and  should I put in a tag for a reprint's original publication (i.e. "Writers of the Future," "Analog" "Whidbey Student Choice"?) 

Oh, and about that cover art, what are the ideal book cover dimensions, anyway?

More as I figure stuff out.