The blog I just linked made the assertion that we should’ve upgraded. I made a deliberate decision not to because the last time I auto-upgraded, it broke my shopping cart and photo gallery plugins. I had to rebuild Peculiar Page‘s shopping cart twice (which still doesn’t work and redirects to B10 Mediaworx), and B10 Mediaworx’s once, which, thankfully, works. To me, it was a no-win situation and in hindsight, I see that I would’ve had to waste all that time anyway.

There was one thing that kept me from being hit on all my other sites, and that was the fact that I didn’t have “Anyone can register” checked. Only on The Proviso‘s site did I have that, and sure enough, that was the one that went down.

I made a Zazzle store for products with quotable quotes from or inspired by The Proviso and Stay. Culled them from fans, and I’m nowhere close to finished, but I’m trying to be more like the musicians who can merchandise the hell out of their music. Now, if I could figure out a way to go on tour…

In other news, Mrs. Giggles says she’s bored with romance bloggerland. So’m I, for all the reasons she listed. And you know, as much as I hate feeling like every time I post somewhere or tweet, it’s self-promotion (because it is, except most of my Twitterstream is me being completely silly stoopid or whining about something), at least I don’t have 90 days or fewer to make certain my sales numbers are enough to sell another book. That’s not a brag. It’s a statement of gratitude. I’m bored of most of all the rest of my regular blogs, too.

I also won’t be reading much of anything for pleasure.

Anyhoo, I’m making my blog vacation official since, you know, I haven’t actually said anything in a week or so because I tend to not speak when I have nothing new to say. Check my archives. Whatever it is, I’ve said it already. Twice.

I have much to do before Thanksgiving and I intend to get it all done.

1. Last fall, when I was formatting The Proviso for e-book consumption, I made a decision to include the EPUB format, which is the heir apparent of the title “The MP3 of EBooks. ” I’ll spare you the geek politics of this.

2. I formatted it in HTML, went to BookGlutton to use their HTML-to-EPUB API. I plugged it in and voilà! a nice EPUB version of The Proviso. No muss, no fuss, and at no cost to me. Beautiful. Perfect.

3. Fast forward to March and I’m trying to format The Fob Bible.

You must must MUST go buy this book. It’s not Mormon-centric in the least (except for one poem, which made me cry, and a story that doesn’t seem Mormon if you’re not). The writing is exquisite and really digs into some of the Old Testament stories we all think we know but…maybe we don’t, right? What might have Job’s wife thought and done throughout Job’s affliction? What might have prompted Jonah to go forth to preach at Nineveh? What the freak kind of email was Ezra getting??? At the very least, go download the sample. And I didn’t write any of it, so this isn’t me plugging my schtick.

So moving along. I’m trying to format the e-book abridged version of The Fob Bible, Plain and Precious Parts. Everything’s going along swimmingly. The illustrations are coming out, the poetry formatting is acceptable, if not perfect, but good within the limitations of the display software. Then comes time to run the HTML through BookGlutton’s API, which had recently gone through an upgrade.

It didn’t work.

Panic set in because I hadn’t figured out how to convert to EPUB other than BookGlutton.

That’s where the journey starts, along with the rant.

If you geek types want EPUB to be the MP3 of e-books, you better damn well figure out how to make it easy for people to create an EPUB format. I spent weeks with your nonsense gobbledygook about XML and XHTML/CSS (hello! I do that!) and yet…not one conversion tool worth pissing on. I can have the best XHTML/CSS in the world, but that still doesn’t give me an EPUB file if I don’t have a grinder to put it through that fucking WORKS!

(Deep breath.)

With regard to The Fob Bible, I knew I couldn’t use SmashWords’s meatgrinder (as I advocated) because of the illustrations and the formatting of the poetry.

You know what? I don’t demand things for free, but if they’re out there and they’re free and they work right, I’m all for it. But I’m always willing to pay for something that does what I want it to do. I couldn’t even find that.

I then used Calibre (an otherwise excellent, excellent program, which had recently gone through an upgrade) and couldn’t get the normal text to show up at all in Adobe Digital Editions (which had recently gone through an upgrade or six—seeing a pattern here?) or the Sony Desktop Reader. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is when the simplest code gets thrown out or doesn’t work or or or…something. I didn’t know what was wrong.

I hied myself on over to Twitter to weep and wail and gnash my teeth over this and one particular TwitterCrank e-book militant invested himself in my issue and we began to hash this out together. (If you read Mike Cane’s [@mikecane] post, you can see where this is going.)

We narrowed the problem to the EPUB reader, which in my case, is desktop Adobe Digital Editions and Sony Desktop Reader (and then, later, FBReader). It would honor <h1></h1> tags, but it would NOT the most important one: <p></p>. I mean, if you can’t get your p-tagged text to show up, there’s something seriously wrong.

Kirk Biglione [@kirkbiglione] (who spent quite a bit of time explaining this to me and talking me down out of the trees) verified my code, said it wasn’t up to snuff (a wrong &mdash; tag—really? it’s that touchy? fuck it), but then Mike Cane (who apparently has more disposable time than I) had run a MOBI format through Calibre to convert it to an EPUB and…voilà! again! It worked.

That was simple. That was easy. I could do that, no problem.

But still it nagged at me, the whole problem of EPUB creation and EPUB rendering (how it shows up on the various software intended to display it).

Somewhere in this process (don’t remember where), Mike Cane pointed me to a little program called eCub and I tried it. It wasn’t intuitive in the least and it didn’t take HTML code without an error or outright refusal. I thought its recalcitrance was my fault and I determined to figure out this program as soon as I got The Fob Bible done. So then I moved on to The Proviso Vignette & Outtakes.

I couldn’t get a handle on eCub. I played around with it enough to know that the best result would be to start with plain text and code it within the program itself (but oh, what a bitch!). I planned to do just this and write the manual for it (cuz there ain’t one, I don’t think), but then I thought, “Why should I?” The programmer doesn’t have a manual for it (that I’ve been able to find) and I’m not spending time I don’t have in email back-and-forths to figure out what should be intuitive if there’s no manual.

Then it was suggested to me (I don’t remember where, sorry) to download OpenOffice and Azardi’s eScape plugin-type thing that would enable OpenOffice to…do something? comparable to “save as PDF”?…and make an EPUB file. Frankly, I never got around to playing with it. Seemed like too much hassle after the tiring processes I’d already been through.

Thus, instead of trying yet another method, I reverted to Mike Cane’s K.I.S.S. advice to put a MOBI file (which I already had formatted) through Calibre, which worked adequately, even if not thoroughly satisfactorily.

Anyway, I decided I didn’t even want to think about it until I had to do it for Stay. except it did occur to me that learning XML would be easier and possibly more effective anyway.

Next up, a tweeter I met through Mike Cane [@alphabitch] had purchased The Proviso through SmashWords in EPUB for her iPhone. Now, disregard the fact that I kept her up two nights in a row for reading this thing on her iPhone, and disregard the fact that she thinks Mormons and Objectivists are crazy (“Knox Hilliard: The crazy never lasts long enough”), concentrate on the portion that she stayed up two nights in a row to read it in spite of the fact that the formatting was awful. Good gravy. I still don’t know if they got that fixed.

I sent her the file I made through BookGlutton, which she said was just fine.

So my problem came back to me sooner than I expected. I needed to provide GOOD EPUB files and I had to have a creation tool to do it. Putting a MOBI file through EPUB would certainly solve a couple of problems, but I still wasn’t happy with the whole situation. I felt like there just weren’t any good options to make a “standard” file everybody seems to want and the geek squad is pushing like they’re the Tony Robbins of ebooks. Rah rah sisboombah blah blah blah. *yawn*

Then last week happened.

David Rothman [@davidrothman] of Teleread tweeted this post by Paul K. Biba: Atlantis Word Processor Can Create EPUB Books. I had a smidgen of hope, you know, like when you’re a freshman and you have a crush on the big man on campus and one day he says “hi” to you? That kind of hope.

I bookmarked the site, intending to go back and really dig into it.

Heh. Not only did the big man on campus say hi, he took me out for dinner at a five-star restaurant, took me dancing, took me home and stayed the night (oh, so fabulously), then fixed me breakfast in the morning, presented me with a ring and declared his eternal love and devotion.

Atlantis Word Processor.

With a few exceptions, it kinda looks like Word, kinda acts like Word, intuitively enough that you don’t mind the exceptions.

It has a template for creating ebooks, and explicit instructions within the template.

It has a “save-as e-book” option.

And…that was all there was to it.

After a little tweaking (and I mean, very little—some of my pet peeves are curly quotes, line spacing, paragraph spacing, and full justification, which it does without question or hesitation), I got the e-book to look the way I wanted it to in Adobe Digital Editions (within ADE’s limitations, as discussed in Mike Cane’s post, linked above).

In Sony Desktop reader, the right was still ragged, but no matter.

In FBReader, it didn’t honor the serif choice for the font and it didn’t indent the paragraphs, but no matter on that, either, because apparently, they’re upgrading it to have better CSS support.

I experimented with the first four chapters of Stay (which took me all of half an hour), sent it off to @alphabitch for her to test drive it on the iPhone and she came back with a thumbs-up (no screen shots, though).

If you can use Word and you understand how to use styles, you can make EPUB e-books out of your manuscripts. I don’t know how else to explain it; it doesn’t NEED explanation for anybody who can use Word. That’s the beauty of it.

Atlantis has a 30-day free trial, and then it’s $35. I paid for it an hour after I installed it for its test run. It was that easy and that quick.

Oh, yeah. The big man on campus did li’l ol’ me up right’n’proper.

UPDATE: I was asked if you can embed pictures. Yes, you can. The template recommends a 400×500 image. I can only presume this is to accommodate the default size Adobe Digital Editions opens up as.

Twitter. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. My thoughts run in small bursts, so it’s perfect for me. Better than blogging. Follow me!

I’m giving up Facebook. I can’t stand it for many, many reasons, all of which would make me mad were I to enumerate them. If you friended me there, I’m so sorry. Catch me on Twitter.

I’m still banned at the Apple iApp store. However, you can still get THE PROVISO on your iPhone using the PDB (eReader) or EPUB files we offer, through SmashWords, and through Scribd.

STAY, book 2 in the Dunham series, will be appearing at all of the above venues some time this winter. Crossing fingers it’s around Thanksgiving.

That is all for now.

Then Th. gave me what I think is an awesome review. Heck, I’m just grateful he read it at all, since as far as I know, he’s the only Mormon who has. He hated Knox. To me, that was incredibly instructive and has had me thinking about a similar reaction I had to the characters in another book, on which I will expound further once I gather my thoughts.

I’m in the process of gathering the vignettes and outtakes from The Proviso (which you can read online here) and compiling them into a nice e-book format for download. This one has a different cover. The photography was supplied by Eric Bowers of Madness Matrix Photography whose work I love and especially because he loves Kansas City, too.

1. LINK

Oddly enough, I see a lot of talk of it being specifically Mormon, and though I found that lent an interesting thread of morality you don’t see every day, it’s also ALL about the sex. Surely, this didn’t come from the same ideology as those fanatics who spent a fortune trying to manhandle CA politics or force feed us the Osmonds as paragons of virtue. . . The religious undertones didn’t even strike me as odd until I stepped away from the story and realized how much the rest of it doesn’t fit with the stereotype. I’m still not sure how to integrate the two…

[...] What most of us identify as “Mormon” just doesn’t really factor into the story. It’s more of an interesting little sidebar and to focus on that aspect ignores the fact that in general, it’s just a damned good story.

2. LINK

…it is one of few books I’ve read where religion and politics mingle, and it was quite a ride. Like a previous reviewer mentioned, I did have stereotypes in mind when I opened this book, and it made the characters all the more human to me, because even though I am not a fan of politics, nor a member of the Morman church, I could still relate.

Moriah Jovan has a gift with words, and a wonderful ability to make her characters so vivid. The heroes, the heroines, and everyone else that crossed their paths throughout the course of the story.

3. LINK

The quixotic mixture of murder, revenge, sex, and religion is really what caught my attention about this book in the first place, especially in the context of the Mormon religion. Wallace Stegner once wrote that “it is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reasons that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.”

Jovan has achieved a remarkable degree of success in this regard, allowing non-Mormons fascinating glimpses in a natural manner without bombarding us with definitions and explanations. There is a refreshing honesty and lack of rationalization when it comes to questions of morality and faith in a modern world.

[...] The characters are strongly delineated and fascinating. They are the most vivid and striking people I’ve had the pleasure of “meeting” via the printed page in a long time. They may be a bit larger than life, so to speak, but never over the top. I don’t always agree with them or like them, but I will always remember them.

Bold is mine. ’Cause it’s my favorite part of the whole review.

Overall, 4.25/5 stars for 8 reviews on Amazon.

And don’t forget! For those of you who’ve read the book and would like to know more about those wacky kids (or you’d like to know where the Dunham series is headed next), you can find a whole slew of stuff at theproviso.com. More content. More entertainment. For free.

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 <p></p> tags.

D. BUILD THE SKELETON OF THE HTML FILE:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<title>…</title>

<style type=“text/css”>

INSERT YOUR CSS STYLE SHEET HERE
OR
LINK TO YOUR CSS STYLE SHEET HERE

</style>

</head>

<body>

INSERT YOUR CLEANLY MARKED-UP TEXT HERE

</body>

</html>

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: &ldquo;
Right double quote: &rdquo;
Left single quote: &lsquo;
Right single quote (apostrophe): &rsquo;

Em dash: &mdash;

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:

<p style=“page-break-before: always”>

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: <a href=“#MARKER NAME”></a>

reference: <a name=“MARKER NAME”></a>

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:

<!– HEADER –>

<header>
<table border=“0” width=“100%”>
<tr>
<td align=“left”>TITLE</td>
<td align=“right”>AUTHOR</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr>
</header>

<!– FOOTER –>

<footer>
<table border=“0” width=“100%”>
<hr>
<tr>
<td align=“center”>PUBLISHER</td>
</tr>
</table>
</footer>

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.

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:

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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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