Tag Archives: KDP Publishing

Road Trip-Day Whatever

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Who cares what day it is? I’ve been stuck in the ditch for a week now, so time is losing all relevance.

Can you tell it’s not going well? Writing this from a deep well of frustration. I went back and, I thought, fixed all of the formatting problems, followed KDP’s publishing guide step-by-step, went back to the beginning and uploaded my shiny, clean, sparklingly new file…and it STILL is telling me I don’t have a cover, I don’t have a TOC, I don’t have an NCX file (whatever the heck that is). I can see the cover thumbnail is there! I can see and use the TOC in the preview! What do you mean I don’t have them? Plus, it’s listing 47 pages of HTML errors, which is a foreign language to me (not one of the 3 I speak, unfortunately).

This is so disheartening, because I am so close, I can almost taste it, but technology is just dangling the tantalizing spoon in front of me, taunting me for my lack of technical skills.

Grrr!

All right. Veni, vidi, vented…Back to the drawing board. Getting very close to just saying screw it and turning it over to a pro…

But I want to do this myself! she wailed.

Send me some good mojo, folks, we’re heading for a bumpy landing!

Road Trip, Day I-Don’t-Have-Time-To Count

What’s that old saying, “Two steps forward, one step back?” Well, that’s my route today.

Step Forward: Finished the formatting (first pass, as it turns out–see Step Back below) this morning! Yay, me!

Step Back: Did spell-check of whole document and was aggravated to find several problems. Really, Julia? What the hell is “fotlooseeeeee?” Think I must’ve nodded off and hit the keyboard. Grr. But…

Step Forward: Inserted ISBN number (after a brief clarification call to their Help Desk–surprisingly helpful!) Now I’m official!

Step Forward: Converted file for Web-htm (yay!) and worked my way through Kindle’s KDP publishing steps, including description, cover image (beautiful!), contributors (thanks, Connie) and so forth, right up to uploading my book and downloading the Preview Your Book feature! Yay! Hang on…

Um…wtf?

Table of contents alignment did not convert properly, nor did my margins!

Giant. Freaking. Step. Backward.

Sigh.

Will have to sit down now, try to figure out what happened in my original doc, resave for Web, etc., etc., etc. Tomorrow, since I’m out of time for today.

But hey, at least I got to see what it would look like before it went live, which was awesome, and which means I’m getting closer.

Step Forward.

Step Back.

Step Forward.

Step Back.

Now, everybody–cha cha cha!

Stay tuned, it’s getting closer!