Mar 292013
 

Cover_test3a_200x300My first self-published ebook, The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades trilogy, is now available on Amazon Kindle. Smashwords is next, though I’m having trouble getting the formatting to work properly.

An expert and historian on consensual sadomasochism began a critique of the sadomasochistic scenes in the best-selling Fifty Shades erotic romance trilogy by EL James. It evolved into a far-reaching analysis that ranges from 18th century romances, to the link between vampires and capitalism, to The Godfather II, to the tangled boundaries between romance and abuse, all on a quest to explain the popularity of this story. This ebook contains revised and expanded material previously published on historyofbdsm.com.

 Posted by at 09:44
Mar 282013
 

On Wednesday, March 28th, I took a deep breath and clicked “Upload”. My first self-published ebook, The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades trilogy, had been carefully converted into clean HTML, and it and the accompanying image files went out into the world.

Within only a few hours, I got a response asking me why my text was also found on a website (i.e. my historyofbdsm.com, where the original blog post series remains). I had no idea this would be a problem. The blog Bad Books Good Times did the same thing with their blog series on Fifty Shades of Grey, and mine had extra material as well as extensive copy-editing. I sent Amazon back an email explaining the situation. No response yet.

While my book was churning through some recondite procedure at Amazon, I diverted my attention to the number two market, Smashwords. I like Smashwords’ philosophy better than Amazon’s: no DRM, lots of different formats.

At the moment, Smashwords wants publishers to submit in Word .DOC format. This suggest an unhealthy reliance on Microsoft’s word processor, exacerbated by the fact that I don’t use MS Office and prefer to work in LibreOffice. Even if you work in Scrivener or something else, Smashwords wants you to upload in Word format, and a very particular form of it. LibreOffice Writer can save in MS Word .DOC format, but it does some peculiar things along the way, like removing headers and footers. I suspected this venture would be fraught with difficulties.

I spent Wednesday evening and Thursday morning reworking the file to Smashwords specifications, and using a combination of GIMP, Libre Office Draw and IrfanView to get the cover image looking good and in the right dimensions. I also ordered another ISBN for the Smashwords edition, which was free thanks to the government of Canada. (One of my advisers on this project says she uses the same ISBN for all her

Smashwords has a two-tiered system. On the first tier, where Smashwords sells your book by themselves, they’re much less fussy about formatting. But if you want your work on Smashwords’ second tier, in which they submit your work to Apple iTunes store and other big retailers, your book needs to conform to a much stricter format.

I spent most of Thursday afternoon removing the auto-generated table of contents and manually rebuilding it with bookmarks and hyperlinks. (You can link directly to headings in LibreOffice, which I use, but the Smashwords Style Guide says not to use them, and create bookmarks instead.) I uploaded it a second time, and watched as it worked through what the Smashwords people refer to as “the meatgrinder”.

It looked good for a while, but then I got the error message from the epub validator. Running it through the epub validation app generated error messages like:

tmp_6357f15fbd059ed108102a8a3a7ceaf1_1cizwC.ch.fixed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_023.html element “span” not allowed here; expected element “address”, “blockquote”, “del”, “div”, “dl”, “h1”, “h2”, “h3”, “h4”, “h5”, “h6”, “hr”, “ins”, “noscript”, “ns:svg”, “ol”, “p”, “pre”, “script”, “table” or “ul” (with xmlns:ns=”http://www.w3.org/2000/svg”)

What’s worse, I downloaded the epub Smashwords had generated and found that all those manually created bookmark hyperlinks for the table of contents had vanished, and all my Quotation styles had been lost too, and the bullet lists were a mess. I’m not even sure what I can do to fix this problem. I may have to borrow somebody’s copy of MS Word and use that to rebuild the table of contents.

I’m particularly annoyed at Smashwords’ insistence on only accepting Word format, when it’s just going to be reworked into a version of HTML anyway.

Results so far: Still not up on Amazon. It was up on Smashwords for a while but missing important formatting. I unpublished it until I can get it the way I want it.

There’s an app called Jutoh that is supposed to convert Libre Office Writer .ODT files into something Smashwords finds palatable. I’ll give that a shot.

At the risk of a workman blaming his tools, I think this indicates that we are still in the early days of ebook publishing, and that ebook formats are primarily intended for fiction. When you try to do things that are standard in non-fiction books, such as bullet points, indented quotation paragraphs, or endnotes, you run into problems. We are a long, long way from “click to publish”.

Mar 222013
 

Under urging from friends, I’ve decided to start a new project and resume an old one.

The first is The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades trilogy, a version of the live-blogging series on my other blog. After more than 80,000 words of commentary and critique on this bestselling erotic romance, I decided to revise, expand and edit them into a book, with some new material. It will be published via ebook on Amazon Kindle and other channels, though I won’t remove the original posts. I see this as charging a premium for a more refined product in a more convenient format (unlike the Fifty Shades books, which look like the original fanfiction postings were published without any copy-editing.)

Yes, it’s somewhat parasitical, but since EL James is freely cribbing from Stephanie Meyer, who says she was cribbing from Jane Austen, why break the chain? In part, this is motivated by money. I have the much discussed “platform”, with my website and my satellite content on Tumblr, Pinterest and Scoop.it, but no revenue short from a trickle from the ad banners and the Amazon affiliate links. I want to see how much money I can bring in, even though the high-water mark of the trilogy’s commercial success has passed (at least until the movie hits theatres).

I’m just dipping my toe into the murky waters of self-publishing via Kindle. I’ve already applied for an ISBN (free in Canada), and I’m grappling with the Kindle’s idiosyncratic formatting. There’s still a myriad of other issues like making the cover image, deciding on the licensing and so on. In part, this is a training run for the next big thing.

The second project is getting back to writing my history of BDSM book. I know I promised I would finish a draft last year, and didn’t, but let’s give it another shot. I intend to finish a draft by the end of year and if possible, and  self-publish it. I’m even considering launching a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign to finance getting it professionally edited and formatted.