Artifacts, Headaches, and a Writer's Dilemma

 So a couple of days ago I got a burr up my butt (and was stuck on my current book) and decided to download the latest version of Kindle Previewer to look at some of my older books, in particular the original edition of Trial (which I published for Kindle in 2015) and Being John Bland, which was was first publishes for Kindle in 2005. Needless to say, it was a rude awakening. Trial survived pretty well, the only difference being that I created it in InDesign for epub and the cover was incorporated into the book file, which I wish there was an option to do that in Kindle Create (there isn't, despite their documentation online to the contrary). In fact, I hate what Kindle Create does to the frontmatter (making everything centered) but it is fast and easy to convert a Word file to Kindle, so that's what I'm using these days.

Being John Bland was another story entirely. I couldn't even open it in Kindle Previewer because it was a mobi file and Kindle now uses kpf files. (Word of warning to those writers out there whose books have been on Amazon for a while--check your file format.) Plus, the original book was created in WordPerfect and later converted to Word, which meant there were a ton of artifacts that weren't readily apparent till I pulled the chapters together and dropped them into Kindle Create. Every single quotation mark, apostrophe, comma, hyphen, etc. were symbols and letters, which meant that I spent two grueling days going over the entire manuscript to correct them (and I missed a couple, but I can live with that because I'm not going back and delving into that nightmare again). Even the print version was a disaster that I had to correct and reupload because the original edition was made in Createspace which is no longer a thing, and despite Amazon listing it on their site as available for paperback, it really wasn't.

But now both versions of the book are corrected and will soon be available for sale, depending on Amazon's approval process, which can take twelve to forty-eight hours. Once upon a time I published on Smashwords (is that even still around?) and the other usual outlets (B&N, Apple, etc.) but I've streamlined my process and just deal exclusively with Amazon now. Someday I'd like to explore audio books, but hiring a narrator isn't in the budget right now and I'm not sold on using AI.

I'm glad the process is all done now but it is three days of my life I won't get back, so from here on out I'll be sure my files are clean and organized so it's easy to update them.