6 September 2009

Friday I uploaded the final manuscript to the printer...and after I did so I discovered that where they used to prefer cover images in .TIF format, they now prefer them in .PDF, so there's a chance I might get the cover kicked back to convert. None of my software will do a reasonable conversion, which tells me it's time to update my apparently ancient publishing software, which dates back to an archaic 2004 (2001 for the text layout software...it's eligible for the AARP by now.)



Yesterday I formatted the book for sale on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. This is not a complicated process, but I managed to invert two letters in the code for a page break, which kind of makes it useless. That turned what should have been a 90 minute job into about 6 hours of hunting for the elusive typos in a wicked long page of HTML.

I are smart, I are.

Now, I wait. I'll either get a proof copy of the print book within a week or so or I'll get email saying "Hey, you screwed up the cover, it has to be a PDF." And I have to wait for Amazon to "approve" my book, because they're now very leery of independent writers, thanks to the dregs who have been uploading bootleg copies of other peoples' work and trying to sell it as their own.

Thanks for that, you greedy bastards.

(The jerks trying to sell other peoples' books, not Amazon...I get why Amazon is doing this now.)