Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Why so quiet?

I've been quiet for the last week or so for two exciting reasons - one, is that a store in Otago purchased a large order of my art and I was involved in assembling a number of art cards and greeting cards and two, I was doing the final touches on my second novel, "A Midsummer Knight's Quest" (which was actually written first).

"A Midsummer Knight's Quest" is now available for Kindle on Amazon, and shall soon be available in paperback format (once I receive and approve my proofs) and also on kobo and hopefully (*finger's crossed*) the Whitcoulls website.




And just so you know - translating books into ebooks is a complicated process!

To convert to mobi (for kindle):
I have to first transform the odf (OpenOffice) into html, before doing that I changed all the fonts into Times New Roman and removed all the illustrations except the title page, map and advertisement at the end (this is because interior images make a mess of the layout and although I kept them in for Aroha's Grand Adventure, this one has a lot more in it).

Then, I convert it using kindlegen, and skim through the generated mobi file, locating any errors (and there were many, I do not understand why - changing fonts, losing the bold of headings etc) and fixing them via jedit.

Once I feel I have fixed them all (and multiple times before) I save and regenerated the mobi file until finally, voila - it looks decent!

To transform into epub:
This can be done from the mobi file or the pdf. When I tried to use mobicreator with the pdf it messed up the formatting.

I use Calibre to create the file.
I then use Sigil to edit the epub - fixing the formatting errors and setting the sections appropriately (for some reason it divided my copyright page up line-by-line).

As I have made some changes, I need to redo the epub file, but it will be a while before it's uploaded. I also need to "order" another ISBN for it.

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