Not So Fast

So, after getting my print book all squared away, I thought I was close to publishing my novel. I just needed to format my eBook, which, thanks to Kindle Direct Publishing’s proprietary software (called Kindle Create), was supposed to be a breeze even for a newbie like me. You just load your Word document into the program, polish up your book so everything looks pretty, and you’ll be good to go. Easy-peasy…right?

To be fair, I think Kindle Create IS reasonably easy to use, and for most people it would be a perfectly good tool to create a lovely Kindle eBook. For me, the problem came when my book showed a glitch in one device mode in KDP’s online previewer. All the other previews looked great, but this weird glitch really had me concerned, so I reached out for help on the wonderful KDP Community forums. Many people responded right away with thoughts and suggestions for getting to the root of the issue.

I tried everything they suggested as well as some of my own ideas. In the course of trying to solve this mysterious glitch, I removed all fixed fonts from my book, uploaded a Word document directly, reformatted my Word doc and tried again (I later learned I did a really horrible job of reformatting it), and eventually, as a last resort, actually learned a little bit about coding (I knew nothing prior to this experience), saved my book as a plain text file, and coded it myself from scratch using HTML and CSS.

Dark Days

When even THAT failed to fix my issue, I contacted KDP technical support for assistance. They were very nice and worked hard to figure out what I was seeing in that one wonky preview, but ultimately came up with bupkis, and left me feeling like they might not even believe that I had seen anything abnormal in the first place (despite numerous screen caps showing the issue). I’m not going to lie to you, people – things were looking pretty dark at that point. My life had been on hold for months, and I just had no idea how to move forward.

A Helping Hand

Desperate and out of options, I turned to the KDP Community again, and an amazingly kind, professional eBook formatter named Hitch came to my rescue and offered to look at my files and try to see what was going on. She did an absolutely incredible job combing through my eBook, searching for any dastardly formatting that might be responsible for the glitch.

To date, despite everyone’s best efforts, there is still no known cause for what I am seeing in that one preview. There was a lot of crazy stuff in my Word file (like, a LOT), but nothing that should cause the specific glitch I am experiencing, and nothing in the EPUB file, either. As frustrating as it is, we may never know the answer. BUT, after talking to an experienced pro who has formatted thousands of eBooks, I feel like there is a very good chance the eBook will render correctly out in the real world. In other words, I’m hoping, based on all of the available evidence (including the MOBI version showing up nicely on my Fire), that the glitch is limited to that one preview, and I am ready to move forward with publication. Phew!

The point of this post, however, is not to whine about my eBook woes, but rather to focus on the positives of what I learned as the result of my experience. I learned the basics of coding, which was really fun and massively useful (I’ll have a separate post about this somewhere down the line). I learned how important it is for me to get familiar with Styles/Headings/etc in Word, because not knowing these things can make an anthill-sized task into a Mt. Everest-sized one. And I learned that the indie publishing community is filled with wonderful people who care about newbies and want to help us swim rather than sink in the scary ocean that is Kindle Direct Publishing.

Next Up: Cover Art Reveal! 🙂