E-Book Conversions, vol 2

Jun 28, 2012 by Lona

As it turns out, I can’t just convert a book to epub format and be done. No, no, no, that’d be too easy. And if I use InDesign the cover art won’t work correctly with the Nook or iPad bookshelves, though the Kindle seems to read it just fine and the cover shows up, but the pagination doesn’t work correctly and everything’s skip-lined like I’d forwarded an email eighty times and it was still 1998.

This really is more of a rant than an article.

The fact is, this is my own fault. If I’d been smart, I’d have simply hired someone to do this. We did in fact discuss that idea, and we rejected it for the simple reasons that we wanted to keep our hands on the project from start to finish. Normally, actually, I would have hired someone. I usually do hire someone. But in this case, I had the clever idea of doing it all myself.

This was an error. I am, in my most basic form, a writer. I’m also, following that line a bit, an artist. I am a photomanipulationist, (there’s a mouthful for you, but I assure you it’s a real word) and I have quite a bit of traditional art training behind me as well. I am not, I repeat, not a webdeveloper. And therein seems to lay the issue. Were I a coder, a hardcore user of ones and zeros, I think it would be much easier for me to master this particular skill. However, I am not. I am an artist at heart.

And artists apparently cannot code worth a $**!.