BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

When I started this blog I was planning a radical procedure on a book: a surgery.

Not a trim, but a partition.

I had a book on Kindle for a while, but I took it down with the idea of breaking it into three parts. In the months that followed, I managed to excise the first chunk of the book and massage it for Kindling. Beefed it up 40 % and so forth.

Eventually, the book went back on Amazon under the name HOT STATUS.

I went to work preparing the second part.

In the meantime, I was researching other avenues of e-publication. That got me to look into Smashwords: an e-book distributor (to Nook, iBooks, etc.). It seemed a good way to reach the other 30 % of the market (after the behemoth Amazon).

Smashwords recently started accepting e-pub files—but only for those markets that accept e-pubs. They still want a doc file for everything else.

I read several books by the founder, Mark Coker. His style book, his marketing book, his "secrets" book. They're all free in a variety of formats.

As I was reading Secret #5 I ran into a problem with my plan to slice and dice my book.

Although the consensus of opinion is that e-books are running shorter and shorter, Coker says his best sellers average 80k words.

(He says the best-selling stuff are books in a series that can be read in any order; he says they should each be over 70k words.)

He says some authors try to cut corners and deliver a full-sized book in chunks. He says readers HATE this.

Made me rethink my plan.

The first chunk of my book was all back story, and I always debated including it in the "real" book in the first place.

Setting this chunk loose made this possible: a shorter book that can be priced permanently at 99 cents. That meant opting for the 35% royalty, which got me out of download or delivery fees. That meant I could safely add a gallery of images (of the Nike radar and missile set). Plus three bonus chapters from the beginning of the sequel.

In its present form, HOT STATUS would cost 18 cents to deliver, had I published it with the 70% option. An annoying amount of money to give up.

I've decided my first operation was a success—the book will stay.

Anyway, I'm working on the "sequel" to HOT STATUS, which will be put out under the title of the original book (MAD MINUTE).

There have been some glitches in the process.

Quite some time ago, when I first tested the waters of Kindle, the idea was to present a doc file to Amazon. Or, for more control, an html file delivered out of Word 03 or 07. My version of Word is ancient (97) and didn't provide the right html file. I hauled my rtf down to the library and used their Word 07.

Right away there were problems.

Smart punctuation came out as narrow black boxes—the same for left and right double quotes as for em dashes. Rewriting in the html file meant copy-and-pasting these boxes into the appropriate spot.

And I did a LOT of rewriting in the html code.

Since then, I've developed a simpler method of creating an html file (running the text version of the book through Mobipocket Creator, then opening it in Notepad++). At the vary least this gets me out of a trip to the library. Plus I can use macros to ease the rewriting process.

The problem now is that Word's auto-correct feature, which I used in the original writing, produced errors. The so-called em dashes created by auto-correct LOOKED like em dashes, but were NOT em dashes. In fact, even Word didn't know what they were. When I tried to convert em dashes back to double hyphens, only a handful of them were found and converted.

During the transition to a text file, these mystery items came out as question marks.

A freaking nightmare!

As I mentioned before, I will no longer use auto-correct when I compose new material for Kindle. I'll use double hyphens for dashes and three periods for ellipses (in both cases, without spaces around them). These are the easiest to find in the html version for find-and-replace conversion to smart punctuation—a process that takes just a few minutes.

Furthermore, I really need to get out of the habit of heavy use of either ellipses or (to a lesser extent) dashes in my writing.

Multiple ellipses in a single paragraph open you up to a variety of spacing in a Kindle—it looks sloppy.

And while dashes embedded inside paragraphs work fairly well (but with a similar irregularity of spacing), they can be a disaster at the end of a line.

I will now only use a dash at the end of a paragraph if that paragraph is less than 20 characters long—for short bits of interrupted dialogue, for instance. That way I don't suffer the ugly consequences of running up against the right margin (in any reasonably sized font).

Same for ellipses.

Anyway, now I'm proofing the remaining chunk of the book.

I couldn't go back to the Word 07 generated html, so I processed an rtf file I had tried to keep current with changes to the book file (html). I know there were probably lapses in this process (which made rewriting the book a genuine chore). At some point I need to compare the previously "published" version of the book with the current version. I'm not looking forward to that.

In the meantime, I'm proofing to find missing dashes and ellipses.

It's an adventure of make-work I hope to avoid in the future.

By the way, despite this botched business of book surgery, it might still make sense to write shorter books (Mark Coker not withstanding). I think the trend is there. Author K.W.Jeter says the future will be for "shorter, faster, pulpier" books.

We'll see...

I'll get back on track (promoting the e-book) in a later post.