Still on a learning curve

It’s not the first time I bit off more than I could chew or got enthusiastic about a revolutionary idea that didn’t work. It turns out that neither Kindle nor Nook is designed to be a web browser. Duh. I should have known that, but since a lot of my e-book reading has been on my laptop, the fact was not obvious to me. A laptop IS a good web browser. 

Last week (err. . . two weeks ago, when I last wrote) the underlining problem I encountered when I uploaded the manuscript turned out to be random links. Continuous, miscellaneous random links. The ones I checked were all sites I had linked to, but not whole paragraphs that included the entire second half of the manuscript. Basically, I had overwhelmed the program in my enthusiasm to take advantage of all the possibilities for linking. 

Bad idea. 

So I started over. 

From scratch. 

The coding errors were invisible; I couldn’t see them to correct them. I had to have a clean manuscript. At least I still had the original for the print version. If it had been necessary to retype the whole thing, well . . . you wouldn’t be hearing from me yet. 

Even without all those links there were little things that didn’t go right—yet another paragraph (four actually) where the margins were tabulated instead of MS Word settings; an underlined paragraph that wasn’t a link; another paragraph that looked fine in the simulated Kindle program, but came out bold in the simulated Kindle-for-iphone program. I lost count of the number of times that I revised and uploaded and reviewed and revised again.

I never did figure out why two links in the table of contents don’t work. Fortunately, one is the preface and the other is the last bibliography—the two easiest things to find without a link. If anyone knows why a hyperlink within the document won’t work even when you have clicked all the right places (multiple times!) exactly as you did for all the other links, please let me know.

And so at last TODAY! the book goes live on Amazon, available to buyers all over the world at the click of a button. (They just won’t be able to link to the Bible verses as I had hoped . . . or the preface and final bibliography from the toc, or . . .)

Now for the e-pub format for Nook. Section breaks instead of page breaks. Different font requirements. Outside links won’t work at all. And a problem with my Barnes & Noble password that is not making things any easier. 

Maybe by next month . . .