I forgotten how much work it was to get a novel together for people to buy. Man! I was like, “Did it take this long to format last time?” And, “Maybe I’m missing something….” And, “I can’t stop at this part…I need to keep going.” And it took HOURS and HOURS to format my novel Jetta from yWrtier to an edit form for my editor; then I had to go over the edits of my editor, and format it again for: the Kindle HTML, the Paperback Format and Smashwords. I had to first start off by putting my novel in Notepad to get rid of all the formatting so that I can use my templates and have a fresh copy.
Geez!
When I thought I knew how to do something, it didn’t turn out right and I had to go back and figure out which step I missed and what went wrong. As I continued on, I begin to see why some authors have choosen just to pay money for someone else to do it. It took me a few days to figure out stuff again and get things right.
Next, I’ll have Creations to do! And then the process starts all over!
Thank the Heavens for TEMPLATES!
If it wasn’t for my Smashword, HTML Kindle and Book Format templates, it would have been even longer. I just had to place my format codes around the formats for my fonts (i.e italics, bold, underline. center), copy and paste the novel in Notepad, and copy each chapter, one-by-one, into each of the templates I had open. I then had to put my formatting back into each area by searching the code and making the correct updates.
Remember these codes?
Bold: <strong>^&</strong>
Italics: <i>^&</i>
Underline: <u>^&</u>
Centered: <c>^&</c>
Yeah, the faithful codes I can put around my formatting and then remove them. It was a lot of tedious work, but I got it done, and hopefully, the next one will go faster. If it hadn’t been so long since I had done all of these things, I think it would have gone much smoother. I’m so glad (and I know I’m repeating myself) that I had these steps and notes to help me along, because this can become frustrating…very fast.
I sometimes wonder if this site has actually deterred some authors from doing the Self-Publishing route…. It does take some time and effort to complete. Hmmmm.
But, when you have a business, and that’s what this is, there’s a lot of work you have to put into it. And in the end, it is always fulfilling.
Until Next Time!
I’m a newbee at this. Lots of sites talk about converting Word to HTML with Word. But found this tool (link below) It will take the contents of a doc or docx file and convert the word text into HTML code. It produces a much cleaner html code than word normally produces. Think it’s safe?
http://www.textfixer.com/html/convert-word-to-html.php
I’ve heard of some converters from Word to HTML, but mostly there are those who want the tags and buttons in Kindle to work with specific HTML coding so, if you have the time and skill to learn, they do the HTML by hand to make sure it’s going to work well when readers want to jump to Cover, jump to Table of Contents or jump to the beginning of the book. But this posts is mainly for how you can use templates to cut all that work down in half once you get one set up. It does take A LOT of work to get a book up and running, especially if you want it done right.
Sigh. Lots of work….! 🙂