YO-YO PUBLICATIONS

In the early morning hours my two Kindle books (HOT STATUS and MAD MINUTE) came down and went back up again. For about the gazillionth time.

First, I wanted to make sure there was no mention of a publisher in the opf files of the books.

And I wanted to mess with the descriptions, adding the wordage and other information (i.e.: bonus material) at the bottom.

I was concerned that the file length supplied by Amazon gave an inaccurate perception of the two books. The one with the largest file (HOT STATUS is twice as big) is actually the shortest book—in fact, at 30,000 words, far from a full-sized novel.

I felt I needed to clear that up, especially since I'm trying to get $2.99 for the one with the short file (compared to 99 cents for the long one).

I also modified MAD MINUTE to reduce the delivery fee from eleven to nine cents.

The main way I did that was to remove images.

I still have the main title page image, which is based on an illustration from an old Army manual depicting the surface-to-air mission for the Nike Hercules system. It gave at least some idea of what the different types of radars look like.

(HOT STATUS has actual photos of the things. I can afford to do that because at the 35% royalty [necessary to get the 99 cent price point] there are NO delivery fees.)

But there were two text-only images in MAD MINUTE I could replace with html text.

I had originally given up on the idea of a text-based page because of the way non-breaking spaces are treated. (Or rather, how they are ignored.) It's easy enough to use a header tag (say h1) to get large text. But if you want to space that text away from other text, you need a way to tell some part of the page to remain blank.

Then I realized I could use a header style to create that space.

I added this to the <style> section at the top of the html file:

h1.top
    {margin-top:60;
    margin-bottom:40;
    text-align:center;}
h2.top
    {margin-top:60;
    margin-bottom:40;
    text-align:center;}
h4.middle
    {margin-top:100;
    margin-bottom:0;
    text-align:center;}

Now I could create both of text files that ran on their own pages, plus name the chapters in the bonus material. (I did it all with just the three header sizes—you could of course use more.)

Deploy header styles just like paragraph styles, for instance:
 
<h2 class="top">Chapter 1</h2>
<p class="start"><b><big><big>S</big></big>PECIAL AGENT FRANK HALBERT</b> kept his SIG Sauer in a two-handed shooting grip [etc]

The margin-top and -bottom specs put white space between elements (called out here in pixels). For the chapter titles, the bottom margin of the title combined with the margin-top spec for the first paragraph, allowing the name "Chapter 1" to be centered vertically above the text.

Earlier, I had used an image file of a piece of nothingness to create the spacing between lines. That looks fine on the typical white background. But if the reader should set his Kindle Fire to "sepia" or "night," those chunks of white would stand out rather badly.

Margins can also be manipulated left and right, to set off a body of text. I once used it for narrowing the margins of my copyright page—just for variety.

Then I noticed the iOS version of Kindle pays no attention to any attempt to alter the right-side margin. That put everything off center, which looked stupid.

So I stopped messing with left and right margins.

I also noticed a glitch with Kindle Fire and Paperwhite when it came to working with margin-top. Those guys seemed to need something to push off from in order to express the top spec. In other words, the first line of header text would sit higher up on the page in these two aps.

I found I could add a blank paragraph to the top of the page (<p></p>), but that only worked on pages named with an anchor tag—like a new chapter.

For an internal title page (i.e.: "Five Days Later...") that is not designed to be an anchor point, I needed to add something to my null paragraph (<p>.</p> or <p>___</p>) before Fire and Paperwhite would space the title the way I wanted.

More petty annoyances from the World of Kindle.

Also: Since I own no actual Kindle devices, there's the possibility this glitch resides only in the Previewer, not the machines themselves.

Nice...