Saturday 31 December 2011

Abbie's Rival To Kindle: The Long Way Round!

When I put Goalden Girl onto Kindle, it was a question of uploading the Word file to Mobipocket, formatting the resultant html file to fit the Kindle page, and within two days it was done. It didn't need much work doing to it.

With Abbie's Rival it's been like having a tooth pulled!

The first mistake I made was changing the first line indents from 0.76 cm, how they were set for the paperback, to 0.4 cm, the recommended length for Kindle. I did this according to recommendations made from an author whose intructions I followed for formatting Kindle ebooks. That worked for Goalden Girl, but when I did this for Abbie's Rival some of the original indents didn't change, so I had pockets of paragraphs which were indented too much. The normal style showed they were indented to 0.76 cm, but when I modified the style to 0.4 cm, this had the effect of stripping ALL of the indents in the entire document! My second mistake was to try to solve the problem in Word. Nothing I did seemed to fix the problem. I wondered if it was a Word 2007 issue - the original document had been designed in Word 2003 - and perhaps the style hadn't converted properly. I could do no more with it. To see if Word 2007 formatting may be the problem I uploaded my Epiworld file, created entirely in Word 2007, and previewed it in Kindle. It was perfect. Annoyingly the first line indents were set at 0.76 cm and they looked fine, so I needn't have bothered changing the indents for Abbie's Rival, anyway!

On the advice of an author on the Kindle forum, I converted the file to a filtered web format and proceeded to plod through the entire document in Notepad, sorting out the tags. I have a basic understanding of html so I've proceeded to make sure my first paragraphs are not indented and the first lines set to 21.55 pt (the html equivalent to 0.76 cm). I've reached Chapter Ten and so far, so good.

Thank God there are only seventeen chapters!

I've spent nearly all of my Christmas holiday trying to get this right, and on top of that I've been trying to edit Big Brother! I want that ready for February at the earliest!

Happy New Year!

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