El Andalous - Formatting

Finally Released!

My New Year’s Resolutions (NYR) series of books is somewhat time-dependent, so since I returned from my travels in August, I’ve been focusing fairly hard on getting NYR Cats! ready for release. I hope some of you managed to pick it up for free on Saturday.

The book itself doesn’t take that long to write, it’s all the other stuff that requires so much time.

Locating pictures that I can use is more difficult than writing the book. For NYR Cats! I got most of the photographs first and used them to give me ideas for the resolutions, whereas with NYR Dogs! I had the resolutions first and then got the photographs. The latter was the more difficult way as it’s sometimes hard to find a fitting picture for my preconceived idea.

However, I rarely learn from myself and as I write this blog, I realise that for NYR Fish! (next year’s book) I’ve got the resolutions in place before looking for the accompanying photographs and I can already sense that I’m going to run into trouble on NYR Fish! in that regard. The advantage of writing the resolutions first is that you start with the knowledge that you have the ideas in hand. If you search for photographs, you could end up with a wasted journey because you still don't get enough inspiration. So, each approach has its risks and benefits!

Another thing with the photographs is the cost. I don’t expect to make much money from the books and I look upon them as a fun project to do more than anything else (of course, it would be nice if they became a cult series and on everyone’s wish list each Christmas, but I’m being realistic instead). So, to keep costs down, I try to find photographs that are under the creative commons license. You can’t just pick any photo from the internet and publish it; you have to have permission to reuse it. Of course, this limits the pictures available to me. Many people post photos on the internet and then just disappear (there’s a brilliant photograph that I’d love to use for NYR Fish! but it was posted on a fish forum 8 years ago, so the chances of that person still posting there is close to zero).

Another option is to purchase a license to use a photograph commercially. It’s not a lot, but at ten GBP per picture for 25 resolutions, it could get expensive (in Egypt, 250 GBP can keep me alive for quite a while). This is why I try to find photographs under some kind of creative commons license that permit you commercial use for no fee.

Because I Iive in Egypt, looking for pictures also costs me in terms of internet usage, since I pay per month according to how much I download. My usage goes up a lot (and hence my internet costs increase) when I’m searching and downloading lots of images.

The photographs also make the book more difficult to format. Some pictures are vertical (portrait) and others are horizontal (landscape), but if you tweak the formatting to ensure that all pictures are sized correctly for each available device (eg, kindle paperwhite, ipad, kindle fire...), all the vertical pictures take up an entire page instead of one-third.

After a bit of searching, I discovered that I needed to put my vertical pictures on a transparent border (more research to find out how to do that) so that they would become horizontal. I won’t bore you with the details, but this then threw up other problems, which I also had to solve. They make self-publishing on kindle sound so easy, but really it’s not always so straightforward!

I write the text using Word, which is another thing that brings its own difficulties with it. The kindle instructions don’t tell you that you have to do strange workarounds to avoid having spaces inserted between paragraphs, that you need to use the Title heading for your title or it will appear wrong on the ipad, or that sometimes Word will do something strange. In NYR Cats! it took me a while to realise that my Acknowledgement heading was too far down the page because for some reason Word had added in an extra (invisible) heading command in the html that only the ipad and iphone seemed to pay any attention to.

Also, I tried to be clever (which is always a mistake, but, as I said, I never learn) and attempted to insert some code to get the “Beginning” hyperlink to start where I thought it was appropriate for readers to begin rather than where it was predetermined by kindle/amazon. However, each time my "cleverly" inserted link took readers to the second page of my Contents, which wasn’t what I wanted. Again, after some searching, I discovered that kindle has decided that if people try to define where the book should start, they will default it to the page after the Contents. So, for many people, this means the second page of Contents. There’s nothing you can do about this, so I had to abandon that idea in the end.

All this and I hadn’t even designed the cover yet. That’s another story altogether.

So, if you’re wondering what I’m doing with my time, that gives you a little taster!