Just an explanation why it takes us so very long to get things out…
First: the book has to be re-read to make sure the in-print copyeditors didn’t do anything creative, and that it is the best we can do.
Second: the book has to be gone over line by line looking for typos, right down to spacing on periods and dots. We follow regular publishing guidelines, in general.
Third: the book has to have a cover of some sort. This takes time, because we love cover artwork.
Fourth: the book has to be designed. We have to figure what typeface, and what pieces we will include.
Fifth, and a real bear: we are now including TOC structure (table of contents) especially for the small readers, so that you can navigate to your ‘place’ and not have to search too far through a big file. Doing a TOC means that during steps 1-3, you have to write the chapter heads and sections a particular way so that the TOC command will recognize those elements and properly structure the book. If you don’t, by a hair, have it right, it all screws up immensely.
Sixth: or fifth: you have to shift the book over into HTML, and run the first assembly, which involves Mobipocket Creator, and getting all your files loaded in sequence, your TOC in order, and your cover image to its liking. A screwup here drops several files on your disc that you won’t want, and that could create confusion later, so for every screwup, you clean up your disk/folders and start over.
Seventh: you create a pdf, with many of the same problems, not to mention that you have to remember to get the page artifacts out.
Eighth: you attack the files with Calibre and try to get a TOC to behave in ePub. It also has notions of where to find its files and what it will look at for a source, so you have cleanup to do if you didn’t do it right.
Ninth-Fifteenth: you do the same job with all the rest of the formats.
Did I mention you proof each one so far as your display device allows?
Sixteen: You then go through the process of bundling all the files
Seventeen: zipping all the files
Eighteen: loading the FULL and the MINI files to the web,
Nineteen: getting each up in the Store;
Twenty: then you have to update the CC pages to reflect it being there.
This takes quite a few man-hours—like over a hundred on each upload.
[Then twenty-one: sob: comes the first letter that says, “Did you know there’s two words transposed on page 355?” —which of course means repeating steps five through twenty.]
Twenty-two: pour self two stiff Captain and Limes and watch a romantic comedy.
Twenty-three: on following day repeat steps 5-20 over again.]
Jane is currently prepping a bunch of her books, and is approaching meltdown, since her computer has decided to malfunction.
Eeek. That’s worse than assembling a house full of flat-pack furniture! I admire the patience you both have to do it without punching out the computers
Crikey.
We bow to you, O Beneficent Ones! We bow to your wisdom, patience and fortitude! We humbly offer up smiley icons, nummy nibbles and fruity drinks with little umbrellas in! Continue to have mercy on us! /bow bow bow/
😆 Formatting is a PITA. You guys are our encouragement.
And just to illustrate, a great big FAIL on a conversion in one format, which worked in others, turned out to be a spare space in a font name buried in the code. Jane came out of that session banging her head against the refrigerator in frustration.
Aaargh, I should have known she’d do that and said nothing. I was thinking she’d
take a note and do the corrections at her leisure. That word seems to be missing
from her vocabulary.
The ebooks were remarkably clean considering what shows up from commercial houses
with a staff with fancy titles like “final proofreader/senior editor”.
Multiple formats are terrible to deal with particularly if the “this is the only
right way to do things” programmer was involved in any of them.
I appreciate the hard work you do, but writing more ebooks is the real plan, and
getting paid now and then.
No, no, it’s all ok. A lot of people spot things and tell us, and we try to have a clean book, so we do try; but what’s up now is a missing format on one download, and new e-books, so new stuff is going to go up soon.
Let me add what Don Wollheim, founder of DAW Books, once told me: “If you go in to fix one small typo, it will create 6 more.” I believe that this is true. It seems to be some sort of wizardly process, and I do not know how, but they crop up mysteriously whenever you have been trying to fix something else. I think they have to do with crop circles.
I just finished reading a paper book that had MANY errors.
I won’t name the book, but it was the most recent in a
numbered series. For example, I noted “flare” was used when “flair” was meant. “Diffuse” was used when “defuse” was meant. I am not sure if these are typos, exactly, or usage mistakes but someone should have caught them. These things are like huge pot-holes; they grab me, throw me around, and make me angry. These kinds of problems seem much more common now than even last year.
Sometimes they’re copyeditor-generated, would you believe? DAW had one that was busily correcting every correctly construed subjunctive into ‘may’ no matter the tense of the sentence or the degree-of-reality. I had a catfit.
Preceded by the one who deleted a scene in which The Pride pulled out of dock, segueing right into the shooting match—because she didn’t understand what they were doing when they undocked. Fortunately the editor and I caught that one. As aforestated, firing at dock is so untidy.
You should have had a catfit! You work too hard to get it just right to have an undereducated editor tear it apart!
I understand that anyone, even the author, could type or write flare for flair the first time through!! I do that all the time in simple everyday writing. It’s not a problem at that point; the story is unfolding and the creativity is moving! However, before they ask a consumer to shell out $20 they need a sharp-eyed editor. I’m afraid they rely too much on the word processing spell-check to catch everything, like lazy students do.
LOL
Sorry, truly sorry! But oh, that was funny!
Wishing you hot tea.
If anyone is interested, a favorite podcast of mine had an episode on this subject today:
http://indesignsecrets.com/indesignsecrets-podcast-128.php
Even if you don’t have InDesign, they give a bunch of cool links like this one which is a matrix of different eReaders and supported file formats (and handy pictures):
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix
Interesting. I’m a designer using InDesign too, Sweetbo — thanks for the link.
Oh, and in the podcast they talk about how bothersome different formats are AND different readers reading even the same file type. It is like trying to format code for websites. What looks good in firefox might not look good in IE or like how an email in outlook might not look good in gmail. It is still a real burden for those trying to put out their books. Compromises can be made, but it is time consuming. Each format is an issue and then the tech behind the device itself can be an issue. An ePub file on one reader could look different in another and while it might look good in both eventually, the person setting the files up can labor at it for a while until that is the case. Someone needs to sort this mess out, but judging the big wars between firefox/IE, outlook/gmail, flash/apple any resolution is far far away. As a reader it hasn’t been an issue, but I know from the back end of it there is a lot of work that happens.
ohhh, yessss.
My favorite typo is in King’s The Stand “He released her beasts.” I find more and more everyday. Don’t know if it’s because I’m now a better reader or their are just more out there. I think computers make them more prevalent, instead of fixing them.
The E-book editing seems incredibly tedious. And this is coming from someone who has spent weeks writing itty-bitty numbers on artifacts.
I think it’s Lynn Abbey who had one where “she undid her brains”…[braids.]
I don’t think typos are becoming more common–I see a wide range of quality in the things I read, ranging from ‘flawless’ to ‘What was the editor’s last grade of schooling…?’ I do believe that many of the ones you do see can be laid at the doorstep of the spellchecker (and its close cousin, the grammarchecker.)
I don’t trust either program, and not because I don’t make a lot of typos myself, but because when I do, I tend to type real words instead of the ones I want to type (ie, I just typed ‘won’ instead of ‘one’. Ew.) If you type a real word, the grammarchecker might catch it, but the spellchecker won’t. And… using a grammarchecker on fiction? Especially dialogue? Um…
Nothing beats a real, live, human proofreader who a: knows what they’re looking at and b: cares about its quality.
The worst typo I’ve seen resulted in the recall of a cookbook worldwide. It was supposed to say ‘cracked black pepper’, but they didn’t quite get pepper right (replace a p with an o, add an l and remove the r.)
I think, Empty Nest, that what you describe may be attributable to spell check programs. I recently had the word “de-risked” (which is probably not a word, I agree, but was used by someone I was quoting) changed to “derricked”. The pesky programs if not watched very carefully could be responsible for a lot of mischief.
yep. In a current scene, I have the expression ‘establish a factor’ in the sense of a person who oversees trade. I have installed the expression [sic] (thus) in the line, which means keep your effin’ hands off this and don’t correct it….ooooh, does my temper with copyeditors show through?
I also believe that my long-running battle to get editors to go from computer file has now resulted in a Great Evil, harried copyeditors who think a spell-checker is the way to speed their work.
So, assuming you already have the book written, it takes about 100 hours to turn it into an ebook. If you sold each ebook for $10, you’d need to sell a thousand ebooks to make $10 an hour. Of course, if you sold five thousand books, you’d make $50/hour, which sounds much more attractive. (On the other hand, if you wrote a book especially for Closed Circle and were only going to sell it as an e-book, you’d have a lot more hours to recoup.)
I don’t have one yet, but just got back from a trip involving planes and airport waiting rooms, and I’m seeing a LOT more e-readers. And I think I can read a book on my new phone, although I’ve only had it a week and am only up to the New York Times thus far, so maybe a lot of the people staring at small screens were reading books as well. Perhaps thousands of books is not an impossible goal.
If any of the three of us on CC could sell 5,000 books in one year on a new book, that writer could kiss NY goodbye while smiling. We’re a long ways from that, alas. But we’ve only been at this 6 months. Once all three of us have more books up, it will increase traffic, and traffic is out there. We just have to get more books up…and then start waving flags and setting off fireworks to attract people off the superhighways of the internet and onto our shady little 2-lane.
Oops. No more posting before coffee. Selling 100 ebooks at $10 each gets you $1000, so by the time you sell a thousand books you’d be nicely reimbursed for your 100 hours of labor. (Still assuming you have a book all written and ready to go.) And of course there would be taxes and other expenses to come out of that.
Fixing one typo does run the chance of creating more. It’s called the defect injection rate and I spend a good part of each year analysing it and trying to predict it. Sadly I have run into instances that have had the rate running at 0.95 defects added for every 1 fixed though a more normal level is around .25
5,000 a year is a lotto sell from your own site.
Selling a new work in one of the popular series, say a Chanur or Bren stand-alone (non Trilogy) book would maximize sales potential. Sales via one of the “bigs” Apple/Google/etc would provide a much larger audience but take a big bite (40% ??) out of your pocket. Have you ever offered your E-books on EBay (either via a store or just an auction) ? Again, the advantage is big audience, and there you keep most of the $. Kinda like advertising for CC.
Never thought of selling a download on e-bay. CUrious notion.
But on the other hand, we haven’t got enough product up there yet: when we do, we’re going to be looking at all sorts of creative ways to get people in here.
It’s worth a look but before you set up a storefront go over the agreements with a fine tooth comb (a flea comb would be best). They can really stick it to you with fees.
Then again, I’ve sold things on eBay off and on for years, bought things as well, and have generally had a good experience.
meh, no edit. “lotto” should be “lot to”. On the other hand, winning the lotto would be a solution 😉
I thought you were just being clever. Selling a lotto books = a sort of lotto win, ya know?
Lately I’ve seen a *lot* of typos in ebooks I’ve purchased, where you could tell they’d simple used OCR software to scan the book in, and hadn’t then even bothered to spell check it… [I would expect that sort of thing if I were downloading pirated books… but not in something I just spent $8-13 on…] It took a bit to realize that “dienta” was really supposed to be “clienta”… at first, I thought it was just a Spanish word I didn’t know!
BTW… just finished “Deceiver”… loved it… (even though I had to read it in dead tree format!)… Love Cajeira growing up! Now I’m just peeved about having to wait most of a year for the next installment!
Seconds the Deceiver comment. It was an exciting book. And the wait for the next book is going to be painful.
Oh good lord. I’m with mrgawe genuflecting and murmurring praises, blessings and wondering if there’s a single-malt-club-of-the-month I can get you two. I dearly wish I had a proverbial clue in hell how to deal with the electronic end of things, but I’ve just never had a need or inclination for such — not sure my brain could wrap itself around the mechanics. But if I could I’d certainly be willing to help. It’s nuts that the three of you are having to deal with this rather than watch koi, ponder what to do with corals, brush kittehs and be devastatingly creative.
You all are very sweet. But the process itself is insane. Jane had one file that, when converted, totally vanished. After several tries (see list above re generation of junk on disk) she finally went back to the original file, cut-and-pasted the text in, and all of a sudden the process that hadn’t worked, worked… If there is a process beset by gremlins it is the file conversion business.
Know what the “disappearing text file” gremlin often is? Font color! White text on a white backgorund doesn’t show up too well! Don’t ask me why that would change, but I have seen it several times.
Ah! Perfect sense! I’ll pass that on!
Alas, J, it gotten weirder than that: now a string of file names (pieces of the book, segmented by end-of-page commands) for no apparent reason stop existing in the Sigil software, but read (after some fuss) in the Calibre software. My own theory is that Sigil is looking where they ain’t, and Calibre (which excels at putting things in weird places) has tucked them somewhere of its choosing, which Sigil doesn’t know about—and which we haven’t found yet, either.
UPDATE: she’s got it. It’s weirder, as Mr. Bradbury would say, than snake suspenders. She has an account of the affair over on her site. I refuse to try to translate that mess!
Sigil has had a couple of bug-fix updates in the past week or so. The description of one of those bugs sounds kinda like what you describe. If you haven’t updated Sigil recently, you might see if that helps …
A fast update for people interested: My sweet Trinkett, who was out running in the yard this morning with Katie, has another tumor and another broken femur. Thankfully it’s in the same leg as the original tumor, and the lungs are still clear, so we are going to be amputating the leg on Monday.
Which makes me glad that I had already decided to commute out to Westercon, instead of staying there. I’ll have to miss some of the evening/night stuff, but if anyone wants to get together for lunch, you can drop me an e-mail. My user name up there is also my yahoo account name.
I am so sorry to hear of Trinkett’s continuing cancer. It sounds like cold comfort but she may be a lot more comfortable with the leg amputated. It’s amazing how quickly ‘tripods’ adjust. My last experience was with Leica, one of my kittehs who had bone cancer. Within three days of surgery she was running around the house. She lived another three years to the age of sixteen. My thoughts and best wishes are with you and Trinkett.
Oh, I am so sorry to hear that! Poor baby— Here’s hoping they get it all, with this, and she does have a happy recovery!
BTW, you wouldn’t think a baseball player would have to do with Trink’s situation, but if you remember Dave Dravecky, http://www.davedravecky.com/index.cfm/pageid/662/index.html he’s still going.
I’m so very sorry. Poor pup! And poor you. Always stressful trying to help when they don’t really understand what’s wrong. Good that the lungs are clear. Hopefully this will take care her pain and she’ll be better soon.
HUGS