Moriah Jovan

The Proviso excerpt download

MoJo — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:46:00 +0000

THIS IS A STICKY POST. SCROLL DOWN FOR MY LATEST LAME ATTEMPT AT BEING INTERESTING.

Of the many things on our to-do list with regard to getting The Proviso out there was to offer a good-sized excerpt as a free download. Well, we finally got around to it today (and just in time for Christmas, too!). Thing is, the book is long. I mean, it’s really long, like 736 pages long. So we figured offering a THIRD of it (that’s over 200 pages) would be a hefty enough piece to whet your appetite. Or not. Anyway.
Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

The 5MB zip file includes EPUB, HTML, IMP, LIT, LRF, MOBI/PRC, PDB, and PDF formats.

If you do like The Proviso, you can buy it at the B10 Mediaworx bookstore in digital and print.

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Rock rejection

MoJo — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:00:37 +0000

Or at least find the value in it.

Between The Apple Blog’s annoyance with books-as-applications and Booksquare’s rant about the newest ScrollMotion book app costing more than the hardcover edition,

When the ScrollMotion App and titles and prices were announced, I had one question for the publishers involved: are you on crack? Seriously, what were you smoking in that meeting?

I think I’m okay with getting banned by Apple.

I gotta find the cachet in having gotten banned. Somehow…

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Creating e-books: Gather your “materials”

MoJo — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:00:34 +0000

I want to make something very clear. What I’m doing is giving you the tools to create e-books from scratch with very little money and not a lot of automation. There’s a reason for this: When you learn it this way, you learn principles you can carry with you to other projects. If you’re expecting oh golly gee whiz bang flashy stuff, this ain’t it. It’s just the nitty gritty. Now, it is a time suck, but hopefully, if you’re inclined toward DIY and you want to know how things work, you might have fun. In fact, I want you to have fun.

I. PRELIMINARIES

For the purposes of this series, I’m going to demonstrate using a short companion vignette to The Proviso called “July 14, 2001.”

A. COVER ART AND ANY GLYPHS

I’ve assumed you’ve formatted your cover art for use on a 6″ x 9″ trade paperback. At 300 dpi (as per Lightning Source’s specifications), that’s 1800 x 2700 pixels. I suggest you do everything to Lightning Source’s specifications because if you eventually want to go into paper, you will be used to them.

I have several different sizes and formats of the cover art for The Proviso for many different purposes. One includes a grayscale .png file for the IMP format that is 290 x 435 because that’s the most comfortable size my eBookWise device allows. Most of the software we’ll be using will allow you to use your biggest size and will re-size it for you.

If you use glyphs (e.g., a publisher or imprint logo), they should be simple, small, grayscale, and in the .png format.

B. FRONT MATTER

1. Title Page

2. Copyright notices

3. Table of Contents (if the work is long enough).

4. Any acknowledgments or specialty items necessary for understanding the story (e.g., family tree, maps, provisos [heh]).

C. TEXT

D. BACK MATTER

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II. PREPARE YOUR TEXT

I’m going to assume you’re working from a Word document. You should work from your final manuscript (with minimal or no styles applied). Do not work from your typeset-with-styles document that you will use for your PDF format.

A. SELECT “Save As…” THEN CHOOSE “web page (.htm; .html).”

B. OPEN THE HTML DOCUMENT YOU JUST SAVED USING WORDPAD OR NOTEPAD.

C. STRIP ALL OF WORD’S MARKUP.

There will be scads of lines of it at the top and some along the bottom. Take it all out. You should have nothing left except straight text with

tags.

D. BUILD THE SKELETON OF THE HTML FILE:

…

INSERT YOUR CLEANLY MARKED-UP TEXT HERE

E. BUILD YOUR CSS (CASCADING STYLE SHEET).

You should have learned how to do this elsewhere.

NOTE: In my opinion, these are the things you should include in your styles:

1. Left AND right justify your text.
2. Put a fraction of a line space between each paragraph if you wish. In e-book reading, I find this desirable, but others may disagree.
3. Indent your paragraphs. I find this desirable no matter what.
4. Make sure your left and right margins don’t go to the absolute edge of the device’s screen.

F. MAKE IT PRETTY.

You don’t have to, but I think it means something to the reader, which is that you care. You care about your work and you care about the reader. You care about how the reader sees your work. They may not notice or they may, but you will know you did everything you could as professionally as you could.

So if this is important to you, do it. Use the HTML entity or ISO Latin-1 code for curly quotes and apostrophes, accented letters, em dashes instead of double hyphens. Find-and-replace will automate the process somewhat. Always use the ASCII codes instead of depending on the visual in WordPad; it won’t translate to Notepad if you care to use that as your editor. For an ellipses, use 3 periods with spaces between them. Do not use the ASCII or 3 periods run together. (You should probably just get into the habit of doing this in your manuscript.)

Left double quote: “
Right double quote: ”
Left single quote: ‘
Right single quote (apostrophe): ’

Em dash: —

G. CHECK AND DOUBLE CHECK YOUR ITALICS AND BOLDS.

Find any other specialty tags you used (e.g., double underline, strikethrough, etc.).

H. ADD IN YOUR FRONT MATTER AND BACK MATTER.

Mark it up as you wish to make it pretty, too.

I. HAVE FUN.

Experiment. Try different things to make it as pleasing to your eye as possible. It won’t be possible for you to make it pleasing to everyone, but have fun in the trying.

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III. REFINE

A. PAGINATE

I say that tongue-in-cheek because, as I’ve already discussed, there is no such thing as a page in an e-book. But for the purposes of this discussion, there is such a thing as front matter breaks, chapter breaks, and back matter breaks and I firmly believe they need to be separated and not run together.

You’ll need this tag:

Live it, learn it, love it.

B. BUILD YOUR TABLE OF CONTENTS

If you have a novella or short story, don’t worry about this. If you have a doorstopper, do this. Unquestionably.

You’ll need these tags:

table:

reference:

C. INSERT HEADERS AND FOOTERS.

If your device/reading software needs that done manually. My eBookWise does and I like it.

You’ll need these tags:

TITLE

AUTHOR

IV. CHECK IT OVER

What you should have when you’re finished is a cleanly marked-up HTML document ready to put through the eBook Publisher to create an IMP file (OEB container). Open it up in your browser. Look for formatting mistakes.

We’re going to start with the IMP (eBook Publisher) because this program has a compiler that will catch a lot of your markup errors and will help you create an even cleaner HTML document for the construction of the rest of your formats.

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Book Review: The Duchess et al

MoJo — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:00:18 +0000

The Duchess, Her Maid, The Groom & Their Lover: An Erotic Novel
by Victoria Janssen
Published by Spice

Please note the title and study the cover a bit. Does that say “romance novel” to you? Me, neither.

And yet, despite the absence of the word “Harlequin” anywhere on the cover, on the copyright page, on the “coming attractions” back matter, apparently, Romancelandia thought this was a romance. I don’t know why, unless Romancelandia simply has no history with pure erotica.

There is a difference between romantic erotica and pure erotica (aka could-be-porn-if-that’s-your-definition) and perhaps Ellora’s Cave has just trained Romancelandia to read “romance” or “romantic erotica” where they see “erotic novel” or “erotica.”

I don’t know how this could have been mistaken for a romance.

Moving along. Jessica, over at Racy Romance Reviews, reviewed this and while her review wasn’t necessarily favorable, it was academic (’cause she R 1) and in no way (I thought) insulting. She also admitted that she didn’t have much experience with whatever “pure” erotica really is.

I wanted to read this book, but balked at paying $11.30 for the ELECTRONIC book, so someone took pity on me and sent it to me, requesting that, if possible, I review it because that person was interested in my opinion (though heaven only knows WHY!).

My opinion is that I can’t finish this book.

Why?

The nastiness that went on concerning a liveblogging “review” incident between Dear Author and Smart Bitches (NOT linking). I didn’t read the transcript, so I am not speaking to whether the liveblogging was nasty or not, but the comments on the thread really, really disheartened me. It destroyed any enjoyment I might have gotten out of it and made me want to pick nits where there were no nits to pick.

I read 40% of the book before I simply had to put it down, so I feel very cheated and I’m going to address others’ complaints of the book that apply to what I read and comment on those, then I’ll pick the two very big nits I actually did have.

COMPLAINTS:

1. Nobody could figure out the setting, but thought it might be somewhere in 17th-18th Century France.

Okay, first, it’s erotica. Have we established this fact? It doesn’t need a setting. It’s a fairy tale and the descriptions were such that I envisioned a Neuschwanstein-type castle.

As long as the descriptions of the castle let you know these characters were amongst lush, and candles were the major source of light, and the clothes were voluminous and bulky, the exact place and time weren’t important.

2. That the sexual situations were totally ridiculous.

Yeah, they sure were. It’s erotica. Have I mentioned that? The “plot” of escaping the abusive-cum-murderous husband is a lot stronger than in most erotica I’ve read, but still more flimsy than that of a romance novel. I suppose if one were reading it as if the plot were the strongest element, I could see how one would be tempted to want to call it “romantic erotica” and be disappointed in the result, but let’s get real: erotica doesn’t need an actual, fleshed-out (heh) plot.

3. That Camille’s reasoning for escaping her abusive-cum-murderous husband RIGHT THEN was flimsy.

Actually, I thought that part was very well set up and the strongest point of the plot. Camille was on the last upswing of the abusive-husband cycle and she knew it. I’ve volunteered at battered women’s shelters. There comes a do-or-die point (literally) for the woman to run and she usually knows when that is. Whether she runs or not…well, that’s up to her.

4. That there just happened to be brothels everywhere along the path they took on their escape route, doubling as inns.

Yeah, there sure were. It’s erotica. Have I mentioned that?

5. There are eunuchs! In a place we think might be 17th-18th Century France. Eunuchs! What the fuck?

Fuck, indeed and precisely. It’s erotica. Have I mentioned that?

STRENGTHS:

I think Jessica summed it up best when she said this:

In some ways, despite the sexual sadism of the Duke, this book offers a very positive view of sex. Sex is the go-to coping strategy for most of life’s problems: Need an heir? Feeling stressed? Husband trying to kill you? Lonely? Bored? Want to show someone you have power over them? Need a place to stay for free? Want to escape those thugs? Need a favor? Want to convince someone to ally with you? Want to thank someone? The answer is sex, sex, sex, sex, and more sex.

That was its strength and its purpose. Why? Because it’s erotica. Have I mentioned that?

Okay, so now that we’ve got all that out of the way, here was my problem with what I read:

NIT ONE:

The cover. Come on. It’s gorgeous, absolutely breathtaking all textured and ripe with hot redhead right there in the center of groping hands and a pearl necklace around her neck (make of that what you will).

Except…Camille is described as having black hair with gray streaks.

FAIL.

NIT TWO, which is the genuine weakness of the book:

The sexual logical inconsistencies. “What?!?!” you cry. “You just finished telling us it was erotica and don’t get hung up on the ridiculousness of it. What could you possibly mean?” Not that way, you silly goose.

1. Camille needs an heir or her husband will kill her. Her husband is shooting blanks. She summons the groom to attempt to impregnate her because any child of his could pass for her husband’s. Okay, so far so good. Sounds like a plan. But immediately after finishing with the groom, she is summoned to her husband’s wannabe de Sade dungeon.

[Her husband] had to fuck her at least once, in case she had managed to become pregnant that afternoon.

Okay. We know she doesn’t want to, but we get the timing issue. But then he doesn’t. And not only does she not worry about this, it doesn’t even occur to her that she missed her chance to cover up her possible switcheroo.

2. Camille’s been married to this dude for 20 years and has been exposed (as a spectator and submissive) to every sexual deviance possible because he’s sick and twisted that way. And yet, this night, the relatively mild antics are…different? And now she’s aroused by them? After 20 years of debauchery? Really? Just now? No, I don’t believe it.

a. She has eunuchs who are her bodyguards and, ostensibly, sexual servants. She has an ivory carving (dildo). In 20 years of exposure and being aroused (for the first time!) that night, she finally—FINALLY!—asks her eunuchs to pleasure her? No, I don’t believe it.

b. In 20 years of exposure and forced sexual obeisance, she’s never given head until this night? (That’s the way I read it, anyway.) No, I don’t believe it.

In other circumstances, she might have enjoyed tasting so large a cock, but not in front of the duke.

So…has she or has she not experienced pleasure before? Has she or has she not given head? The implication before this passage is that she had (by force), but at this moment thinks about how delicious it might be if her husband wasn’t watching? Say what? No, I don’t believe it.

c. It’s discussed that she was never unfaithful to her husband—in 20 years!—and just that day with the groom was the first time for seeking her pleasure elsewhere and the first time, in fact, that she’d known pleasure at all. No, I don’t believe it.

d. Once the entourage takes to the road, it’s as if everything is a new experience for her, as in, she never knew X activity existed. She becomes lovers with her maid and the author makes a point of letting us know that she hasn’t had a woman. Really? In 20 years of Duke Debauchery and forced sexual obeisance and his own propensity toward voyeurism and she’s never done a woman? No, I don’t believe it.

I think I would have had a problem with Camille’s contradictory sexual history anyway, but I don’t think it would have made me simply put the book down and not want to pick it up again. The unpleasantness surrounding it combined with that simply destroyed any enjoyment I might have had.

Quite simply, it was a chore to read, which frustrated and disappointed me to no end because it was a book I wanted to read and expected to enjoy.

Since this was given to me, I’d like to pass it along. First person to email me gets it.

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Faith and hope and elbow grease

MoJo — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 06:00:12 +0000

I’m a permablogger over at Publishing Renaissance (for those of you who don’t know). I’m alternating Thursdays, starting January 1 (yeah, I know, it was 2 days ago). And it’s so cool to be kicking off Publishing Renaissance’s year.

Lately, I’ve been around some blogs that are extraordinarily kinda negative and I notice it brings my production down, in terms of writing the next books in the Dunham series, in terms of the projects B10 Mediaworx has on the table right now (I don’t have enough fingers to count), in terms of my own blogging, in terms of doing what writers are supposed to do once their books are published, in terms of the DDJ, and most importantly, in terms of how I treat my Tax Deductions and Dude. I know I shouldn’t allow myself to be that influenced by negativity that it starts trickling down to my fandamily, but I am.

I’ve never been a positive-thinker type of person, but Dude is and he’s rubbed off on me. I’m also not one of those “think it into existence” people, either. It’s just that I’ve noticed that the more productive I get the more positive I get; the more I hang around negativity, the less productive I get. This isn’t a good situation. I have too many interesting things to do to mess around with things that don’t advance my goals.

One of the interesting things I’m into is, as you know, independent publishing. While I do point out what I feel are the weaknesses of traditional publishing (and I’ll admit to a certain level of frustration and bitterness—I’m only human), I do that to highlight the fact that one can be in charge of one’s own destiny—

—and it’s an incredible feeling, let me tell you.

There are “vanity press” naysayers and name-callers and compulsive “helpers” who aren’t really helping. The fact that they quite often don’t differentiate between “vanity” and “POD” and “self” publishing is, I think, a function of insufficient research or a measure of insulation from the querying masses or resentment for taking a “shortcut” and bypassing the “system.” Depending on the day, that might hurt my feelings, but I keep on keeping on.

Mostly what keeps me going is when I look at the pile of projects that have been brought to us (B10 Mediaworx) that are incredible and fantastic. To know we might have a role in bringing such incredible and fantastic things to the public—things that have never been done before and we would never have conceived of on our own—because I took my destiny in my own hands is…

I have no words to describe it.

We might fail. I might fail.

And that’s okay.

But I have to make the effort, cut through the bullshit, and go forward with courage and optimism. Maybe, just maybe, I can offer someone else a hand up or a piece of information they needed or some encouragement along the way.

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Kansas City: Randomidity 1

MoJo — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 06:00:07 +0000

My stats say that consistently the most viewed spot on this site is the Kansas City picture gallery. I don’t know why, but I’m glad because you know what? We have some nice stuff here. It’s the cozy kind of romantic where you snuggle up with your honey in front of a fire feeling.

UMKC (University of Missouri-Kansas City) is an urban commuter school in the University of Missouri (known for the journalism school) system with the one in St. Louis and Rolla (School of Mines). UMKC has a law school, an MBA school, a pharmacy school, a dental school, and a medical school. But it doesn’t look urban or commuter once you start going from building to building. I think people forget that once you get off Rockhill Road and start walking, it’s a very pretty (and more importantly!) compact campus. (Uh, but could you plant more flowers, please? BYU spoilt me on the flowers thing.)

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Platte County is, weirdly, the same shape and size as Chouteau County in The Proviso and it’s in the same spot, too! I don’t know how the hell that happened.

Although it’s not exactly the same demographic, it has Parkville, which is just too cute. If you’re coming into Parkville via 3rd Street from the north going toward the Missouri River, it kind of reminds me of a microscopic Estes Park, Colorado. Or at least, the Estes Park I remember from my childhood. Without the mountain part. If you’re coming into Parkville via 9 Highway from the east, it kind of reminds me of Hannibal, Missouri. Only with a smaller river. There’s a walking path in English Landing Park right along the river.

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And about that Chouteau (pr. SHOW-toe) County thing. If it’s not an English or Irish word around here, it’s Shawnee or French. There’s a reason for that. Anyway, half of the northland (i.e., north of the Missouri River) is Chouteau this and Chouteau that and Chouteau something-else. When I was looking for a name for my not-so-fictional fictional county, I looked it up and there was NO Chouteau County in Missouri. Surely, this must have been an oversight, thought I, but yay for me. Something uniquely Kansas City that hadn’t been done.

Yet.

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Happy new year, pass the bleach

MoJo — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:00:59 +0000

Okay, so I’m a schmuck who makes New Year’s resolutions. Kinda sorta. Maybe. It depends.

This is how it goes.

On New Year’s Day, I take down the Christmas tree, throw a sheet over it and stick it in the coat closet. In my world (and it took me 6 years to bring Dude around to it, although he won’t ever completely be around to it), you decorate a Christmas tree once about every ten years. And only once.

Next: Taxes. This means bookkeeping.

If I’ve been a good girl all year, this will only take me 2 or 3 days. If I haven’t, well…a week. It involves the following:

Paring files.

Sorting receipts.

Tossing, shredding, burning.

And other activities indicative of office-spring-cleaning.

What do I end up with? A clean office, clean files, and my cursor on the TurboTax SEND button the minute Dude’s W-2 hits our mailbox.

Next: Hard drives.

Next: Storage room.

Next: Projects A, B, and C

Get the drift?

I might not get all of this done, but I like to spend the new year cleaning out the past year and preparing for the new one. I simply cannot make any New Year’s resolutions until I burn through the past, look to the future, and figure out where I need to go next—

—which means I usually end up making my New Year’s resolutions on or about November 12.

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Creating e-books: The easy way

MoJo — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 02:02:08 +0000

I AM AGAINST DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (DRM). ANY VENDOR I RECOMMEND WILL SHARE THIS STANCE AND ANY INSTRUCTIONS I GIVE WILL IGNORE ANY POSSIBILITY FOR ENCRYPTION. IF YOU WANT TO LOCK UP YOUR WORK, FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF.

In my last episode, I instructed you to go learn (X)HTML/CSS. I was gently taken to task for that with the point, “writers shouldn’t have to learn code.” While I am of the opinion that for some writers, this is not only true, but that they should be kept from any computer interaction whatsoever, I’m afraid it’s just not realistic in the long run. You will learn something, even if it’s only the paragraph tags and all of it will be useful to you at some point.

Yes, you can use blogger.com or wordpress.com or any other sign-in platform for your blogging.

Yes, you can use Word and PrimoPDF to set type and distribute your work as a free PDF.

If you want to:

A. want to offer more than one file format (PDF) and/or

B. want to charge for your work

you’re going to have to either pay someone to do it for you or learn how to do it yourself.

There are quite a few places that will help you with #A.

FEEDBOOKS. As far as I can tell, if you use this service, you must offer your work for free. If this is not acceptable to you, just don’t use their service. (And if this isn’t true, let me know because I scoured the site and couldn’t find any “payment” type information. ) Also, you must manually build your book. Now, this has its pros and cons. The con is that it takes a while. The pro is that you can make it look purty with a little care and attention without having to learn much (if any) (X)HTML/CSS.

BOOKWORM. This is a peculiar service in that you may upload your own book, but the only format you get is the EPUB format. It is also more for reading than publishing (as far as I can tell; more information on this is welcome).

SMASHWORDS. This is the Q-DOS of e-book building/formatting. It’s very quick. And yeah, sometimes it’s dirty, especially if you don’t format your Word document correctly (as in, according to standard word processing practices and to SmashWords’s style guide). That’s the con. The pro is it’s fast and you can charge for your work.

I’m making several assumptions here. The FIRST assumption is that you want your book to be in as many electronic formats as possible. The SECOND assumption is that you want to have those formats available to you on your own hard drive for dissemination as you please. The THIRD assumption is that you want your work to have widespread visibility across the interwebz. The FOURTH assumption is that you might want to get paid for your work.

So let’s talk about SmashWords.

I heard about SmashWords from Eugene Woodbury quite a while back, who used it for his novel Path of Dreams, but I dismissed it because I thought the work had to be offered free. Then Zoe Winters used it for her free novella “Kept.” Okay. But then Aaron Ross Powell used it to offer his draft of The Hole in more formats than Kindle right after I bitched about it. Then RJ Keller used it to offer Waiting for Spring, and that’s when I had the V-8 moment.

I figured, well, what the hell, I’ll try this thing. So I took a vignette from The Proviso’s world (not in the book) called “25 to Life” and decided to put it on Smashwords.

CAVEAT: “25 to Life” did not call for fancy formatting like The Proviso does. The Proviso has blog posts, e-mails, news clippings, court transcripts, social services records, a wedding announcement, and other specialized formatting that required different fonts, spacing, and margins to make those items look good. If you have something like that, this WILL NOT WORK for you.

Assumption 1. That you want your book to be in as many electronic formats as possible.

They have this nifty little API they call the “MeatGrinder.” It will turn a plain, properly formatted Word document into any one or more of the following digital formats:

Format	Full Book
Online Reading (HTML)	View
Online Reading (JavaScript)	View
Kindle (.mobi)	Download
Epub (open industry format, good for Stanza reader, others)	Download
PDF (good for highly formatted books, or for home printing)	Download
RTF (readable on most word processors)	Download
LRF (for Sony Reader)	Download
Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices)	Download
Plain Text (download) (flexible, but lacks much formatting)	Download
Plain Text (view) (viewable as web page)	View

As you can see, that’s a lot of variation. I got both The Hole and Waiting for Spring in the RTF format, as that was the easiest for me to convert to my eBookWise reader. Powell asked for $2.99 and Keller offered hers for “you set the price.”

Assumption 2. That you want to have those formats available to you on your own hard drive for dissemination as you please.

I don’t even know if you have to buy it yourself (if you set a price) to download which formats you want to offer from your own site or elsewhere, but even if you do have to, you got off cheap in both time and money.

Don’t be an ass. Be courteous and leave it up on SmashWords. They did the work for you.

You will NOT be able to get a straight HTML document to download and then tweak to other formats, which is good.

Assumption 3. That you want your work to have widespread visibility across the interwebz.

The founder of SmashWords, Mark Coker, says: “Our mission is to give every author a chance to find their audience.”

SmashWords is gradually gaining in name recognition and usage. Augment your presence on SmashWords with placement of your work elsewhere on the ’net. It benefits you and SmashWords (you know, the people who did the work for you).

Assumption 4. You might want to get paid for your work.

There are several payment options at SmashWords, which I’ve addressed. In my first “creating ebooks” post, commenter and indie author champion Morris Rosenthal told me about e-junkie.com, which is a payment portal for downloads. He’s had quite a bit of success with this method, though I can’t vouch for it at this time (although I do intend to check it out).

However, as far as I know, SmashWords is the only independent e-publishing vendor that offers an API process AND a payment portal and quite frankly, there’s just nothing else that beats that, even if you do have to sacrifice a little formatting.

So after having put “25 to Life” up on SmashWords, used their API, seen their output, what do I think?

The HTML and Java versions (the ones that you read on your computer) are very pretty and you can adjust fonts, colors, and sizes as you like.

The plain TXT ones are, well, plain text. It says “may lack some formatting,” but if you know anything about plain text, you know that means NO formatting.

The EPUB (use with Stanza for iPhone/iTouch, Adobe Digital Editions) format doesn’t seem to have centered anything, but I can live with that.

The LRF (Sony) and PDB (Palm) didn’t pick up the italics, which is something I CAN’T live with, but it’s being worked on right now (no promises!).

The PDF looked like a manuscript because, well, it comes from a plain Word document, so you know that going in.

The MOBI/PRC (Kindle, MobiPocket) looked great.

The RTF is obviously going to look just like a Word document, and it’s my go-to for conversion to IMP (eBookWise), so I don’t care how it looks.

If you follow the SmashWords style guide to the letter, you’ll have a slew of decent-looking e-books (including EPUB!) as defined by my last post on “the page” and you’ll get them in about 3 minutes, along with a payment portal.

SmashWords is an elegant little API, and it’s still in beta testing. I can’t wait to see what it’ll be at full force.

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A rose by any other name

MoJo — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:08:35 +0000

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the definition of a “book,” or more specifically, the proper formatting of an e-book, and the definition of a “page” and its importance in the New eWorld Order.

I’m here to tell you: Unless it’s on paper or in PDF, they ain’t no such thing as a page.

I’ll admit that it took me a while to get used to reading on my eBookWise. Between the whacked-out spacing and the left justification and the lack of paragraph indents, it looked…sloppy. Inferior. But I stuck with it and realized that each book is formatted differently; some are prettier and easier to read than others, but mostly not. I did, however, have problems even with the “prettiest” of the formatting. I was able to adjust my expectations of the presentation once I realized it was a function of the DEVICE and that the DEVICE was not a print book. The print book and the e-book simply have nothing in common except the words they contain: not headers, not footers, not design, not formatting, not…page numbers.

To use the “page” as common ground, each user must have the same edition of a paper book and/or the same edition of the PDF file, but that’s a fairly easy task to accomplish.

In any other format, however, it’s nearly impossible without each user having the same device, the same font settings (i.e., large or small), the same page view settings. Gentlemen, let’s synchronize our devices. Taking the probability of that into account, then, the concept of the “page” vanishes.

The latest argument I have seen for the need for strict pagination in e-books to approximate or duplicate that of a print book is for reference books and the uses of academia viz. for annotation and bibliography, tables of contents and indices, footnotes and end notes. What this demonstrates to me is ignorance or lack of vision or an inability to understand the vast differences in the format, and the capabilities and limitations of each.

ANNOTATION and BIBLIOGRAPHY

When your bishop or your preacher or your pastor or your minister or other Protestant-type ecclesiastical leader gets up and wants everybody to flip open their Bibles, does s/he say, “Please turn to page 1436 in your Bible”? No. He says, “Romans chapter 15.” (Cause that’s where mine is. In the King James Version. What if you prefer to use a different version? No problem! Romans chapter 15 is still where it’s supposed to be, which is between Romans 14 and Romans 16.)

When your English lit professor or your director or your acting coach directs you to a certain passage in a Shakespearean play, does he say, “Please turn to Hamlet, page 783”? No. (Well, first of all, he’s OBVIOUSLY working from an anthology if it has 783 pages to begin with.) He says, “Please turn to Act 2, Scene 2, Line 35.” So what this means is I was smart and brought my little bitty Hamlet and everybody else was stupid and brought their big fat anthologies. And it makes no difference whatsoever.

The two print books, Bible and Shakespearean anthology, have page numbers. But they aren’t referred to or necessary for annotation or bibliography. In fact, the only thing they’re used for is within the book itself to create tables of contents and indices.

So let’s talk about that.

TABLES OF CONTENTS, INDICES, and FOOT/END NOTES

There’s only one thing a table of contents and/or index is good for: To find your place in the book. Thing is, in a print book, that’s the only way you can find anything…maybe kinda sorta quickly.

In an e-book, the tables of contents and indices have completely different purposes. In fact, an index isn’t even necessary in an e-book, although I would argue that a table of contents is. However, their function and mechanism of use are entirely different from that of a print book.

1. It’s called a hyperlink.

Now, don’t be scared. I’m sure you’ve seen them before here and elsewhere on the interwebz. You put your cursor over it and click and boom…you’re somewhere else on the interwebz. Cool, huh?

You can do that in an ebook, too.

A list of hyperlinks in the beginning of the e-book serves the same function as the table of contents serves in a print book. A print book has page numbers after the chapter name. An e-book has a hyperlink you touch with your stylus and boom, you’re there, same as it works on the interwebz. No page numbers? No problem! Not necessary at all.

But hyperlinks are good within the text, too. If a word is hyperlinked, you touch it with your stylus and it takes you to further reading. They used to be called “footnotes” and “end notes.” Don’t need those anymore, either. Oh, they’re still footnotes and end notes, but they have no precise structure because it’s not necessary. The device will take you where you need to go.

2. It’s called the “find” function.

You can’t do this in a print book. There is no CTRL-F. There is no “Find.” You go to the table of contents and/or the index and if you’re lucky, that book had an excellent indexer. If you’re not, well, good luck to you then. I’m going out to get some Chinese while you look for that reference. Want anything?

Is there an e-reading device that doesn’t have a “find” function? If there is, smash it and get something else, ’cause there is no point to an e-reading device without a “find” function. Because why? Because there are no page numbers.

If the argument (with regard to reference material) is that e-reference books can’t be annotated or bibliographed or referenced, there’s a simple way around that. Organize the book in some other fashion, a la the Bible or Shakespeare. It’s been done. The system’s only been around for a few hundred years now. If it ain’t on paper, it ain’t got pages.

And if it’s inevitable, just lay back and enjoy it.

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Book Review: Waiting for Spring

MoJo — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 17:00:14 +0000

Waiting for Spring
by RJ Keller

It’s been a long time since I threw common sense to the wind and stayed up to finish a book knowing how much I had to do the next day, but not resenting it the next day because it was totally worth it.

This book has no spiffy genre classification. After some thought, I think I’d call it “literary romance.” I don’t know what “women’s fiction” is and I’m not sure I really even know what “chick lit” is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not either of those. And you know, lately, I’ve been very happy with the books that haven’t been easily classified.

Here’s the blurb:

It’s not the kind of pain she can see and smell and wrap with an ace bandage. It’s the kind she tries to numb with sex and work and cleaning-cleaning-cleaning the house. The kind that comes from enduring a lifetime of rejection. First from her mother–whom Tess knows would have aborted her had the law allowed it–then from a string of men whose names she can never remember. And finally, at age thirty-four, from her husband of ten years; the man who once promised to love her forever.

You want angst? I gotcher angst right here, pal. And this is the good stuff, the kind that jerks you around and bashes you over the head and makes you come back for more to see how it all ends. In my experience with literary fiction (one of which was an Oprah pick—sue me), there seems to be some sort of unwritten rule about writing angst, which is to understate it, to let the subtleties of the angst dawn on the reader like a sunrise behind storm clouds.

Problem with that approach is that A) I don’t ever get to know or care about the characters enough to care about their angst and B) their angst isn’t that big of a deal anyway; if the characters clearly don’t care about their angst, why should I? So I’ll read literary fiction, don’t get me wrong, but later, I’ll scratch my head and say (if asked), “Yeah, I think I read that book, but I don’t remember the name or the author.” I just remember dipping my toe in the wading pool of that world once upon a time.

The main character, Tess, has angst and she doesn’t seem to care about her angst, either. But I cared about her angst from the very first paragraph:

They say actions speak louder than words. Maybe. But words do a hell of a lot more damage. Even well-meaning words spoken by well-meaning people.

People like Sister Patricia Mary Theriault. She was my catechism teacher when I was seven years old. Until she ruined my life. [...]

Then she told us about the bad soil. [...] But the only bad soil I heard about was this:

“As the Sower was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on and–”

Path. Trampled. Bad soil. [...]

“Don’t let your hearts become trampled down, children. Keep them soft and fertile so you can feel God’s love inside of you.”

Seven years old. And already I knew I was in some deep shit. The kind that even Sister Patricia couldn’t do anything about.

The twin hyperbolic allegories of “until she ruined my life” and “Seven years old. And already I knew I was in some deep shit” are not, actually, hyperbolic or allegorical, but the reader doesn’t find out why or how until far, far into the book.

You might be tempted to point out that this is simply excellent fiction infrastructure, to which I would say…yeah, I know. But I don’t see that a whole lot anymore. As far as I can tell, the current writing fad is to make me, Random Reader, ask the question and then never let it linger like a good combination of spices on my tongue or let me savor the moment of enlightenment when/if it happens.

Instead, it will ask the question and proceed to answer it for me 2 pages later and sometimes, even worse, will over-explain it in case I didn’t get it fast enough or thoroughly digest all the layers of subtext. I’m very tired of being treated like an idiot in my fiction and, further, I hate that I actually have to call attention to this amazingly annoying trend.

There are quite a few laugh-out-loud lines, sharp. Wry.

When Tess, age 34, takes Brian, age 25, as a lover, they finish, talk, then begin again not long after. Tess observes,

Ready again. Twenty-five. Gotta love that.

Keller also gives the reader glimpses of the spirituality that’s woven all through the tale; they glimmer, like the gold threads in shot fabric:

The stars, he said, were actually souls; all the souls that were too restless to be locked up in heaven. They were so restless that God let them stay outside at night to play.

And when an 8-year-old girl about to take her first communion asks Tess if she believes in God, Tess says:

“Yes, I believe in God. I just…I don’t feel close to him in church.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

I shrugged, even though I knew exactly why. I knew because I’d felt that way since I was a little girl, sitting in my church clothes, listening to the Mass. Trying to feel His presence. Struggling to feel His love. But there was nothing there. Nothing but words I didn’t completely understand and scary status. And then, one beautiful Sunday Spring morning when I was nine years old, something occurred to me. Something I never told anyone else.

He’s not really in here. God doesn’t live inside a building, and that’s all a church is; just a building filled with lots of words. [...]

Because Anne [of Green Gables] said that if she really wanted to talk to God, a real true prayer, then she’d have to go outside to do it. She’s need to surround herself with God’s creation, with His beauty; drink it in and let it fill her up. And then she could look heavenward and just feel a prayer.

The narrative itself is choppy, with sentences and paragraphs written in fits and starts, which perfectly mirrors Tess’s personality and her coping mechanisms (particularly her “personality disorder”). In fact, a good portion of Tess’s internal dialog and her observations are written as wry asides to herself and she is inviting you, Random Reader, to chuckle along with her.

And I did. Even while I had tears running down my cheeks.

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