David Kudler's Blog, page 12
January 10, 2017
Read the exciting prologue to Timepiece!
It’s June 18, 1815, Waterloo, Belgium, and if Wellington’s beleaguered British army doesn’t get help soon, all will be lost. The indomitable Duke of Wellington sends for reinforcements…
And the aid that comes is not General Blücher’s Prussian forces. Rather, the rescuers of the Empire are a nightmare regiment dreamed up by a mad Genovese scientist.
Read the exciting prologue to Heather Albano’s Timepiece: A Steampunk Time-Travel Adventure — the first volume in the Keeping Time trilogy!
READ NOW
About Keeping Time
You only THINK you know
what happened at Waterloo.
The real story involved more monsters.
And a lot more time travel.
“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312
Keeping Time: A Steampunk Time Travel Adventure Trilogy by Heather Albano
[image error]It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.
It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.
It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.
Are these events connected?
Oh, come now. That would be telling.
The post Read the exciting prologue to Timepiece! appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
January 3, 2017
Timepiece Now Available
Timepiece, the first volume in Heather Albano’s exciting steampunk time-travel adventure trilogy Keeping Time, is now available from Stillpoint Digital Press.
Timepiece is a steampunk time travel adventure about a girl, a pocket watch, Frankenstein’s monster, the Battle of Waterloo, and giant clockwork robots taking over London.
Science fiction master Kim Stanley Robinson called it “propulsive adventure with historical insight.”
You only THINK you know what happened at Waterloo
The real story involved more monsters. And a lot more time travel.
It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.
It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.
It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.
Are these events connected?
Oh, come now. That would be telling.
The first volume in the Keeping Time trilogy, Timekeeper was in part underwritten by a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign.
The book is available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook form and includes a foreword by science fiction author Kenneth Schneyer, as well as a preview of volume #2, Timekeeper.
Timepiece is now available through StillpointDigital.com, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and your favorite bookstores.
Through January 17, enter the Timepiece Release Sweepstakes for a chance to win over $500 worth of prizes!
About Heather Albano
Heather Albano is a storyteller, history geek, and lover of both time-travel tropes and re-imaginings of older stories. In addition to novels, she writes interactive fiction. She finds the line between the two getting fuzzier all the time.
Heather lives in Massachusetts with her husband, two cats, a tankful of fish, and an excessive amount of tea. Learn more about her various projects at heatheralbano.com.
The post Timepiece Now Available appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
December 22, 2016
Following Bliss: Joseph Campbell and Jackie
A current movie reminded me of a publishing story that I’d love to share with you.
For once, this isn’t about independent publishing: it’s about a big publisher struggling to find the right cover design.
Joseph Campbell copyright © 2011 Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF.org)In 1988, Joseph Campbell had just died, but the series of television interviews that he did with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, became an enormous hit—the highest rated program PBS has ever aired, to this day. It was this series that introduced most of the non-academic world to Campbell and made a household phrase from his dictum, “Follow your bliss.”
An editor at Doubleday, then one of the Big 8 publishing companies (it’s now an imprint of Penguin-Random House) watched the first episode and thought, This has GOT to be a book!
And her next realization was, And it’s got to be out NOW!
She contacted the partnership that produced the series and hired the woman who had served as Moyers’s research consultant, an academic with the wonderful name of Betty Sue Flowers. (It’s from her that I heard this story.) Basically, working from transcripts of the still-incomplete series, Dr. Flowers and the editor pulled together a complete, enduringly beautiful book—in two weeks.
If you’ve ever been around books at all, you know how astonishing that feat was. Books—especially complex, heavily illustrated and annotated books—usually take months if not years to go from conception to being ready to print. That’s true even in this age of digital distribution.
Who was the editor that accomplished this astonish publishing miracle?
JackieJacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
Yes. That Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Jackie Kennedy. Jackie O. Jackie.
Everyone who remembers her remembers her as John F. Kennedy’s wife and widow.
That’s the person portrayed (to favorable reviews) by Natalie Portman in the current film, Jackie.
After Kennedy’s death, however, Jackie went on to live a full and rich life, if a challenging one for one born to wealth and power.
From the mid-1970s to her death in 1995, however, she served as an associate editor at Doubleday. There she published hundreds of books, including many on history, as well as a number of novels and memoirs.
And of course, in 1988, she helped to introduce the concept of following your bliss into the public consciousness.
Now the story that Flowers tells that I remember best about the creation of that book is this:
They’d managed to pull together the book in two weeks. Flowers had compiled the text (crediting Jackie in the preface), and a small army of photo researchers found images that worked with what Campbell and Moyers were discussing.
The one thing they couldn’t agree on was a cover image.
They wanted something evocative, but not too literal. They didn’t want to use Greek sculpture, for example, because Campbell’s whole argument was about the universality of myth.
Around and around they went, defining just what they were looking for.
At a certain point, Jackie looked up at the painted dragon on her vintage Chinese silk coat. “How about that?” she asked.
That turned out to be one of the more iconic covers of the 1980s. It managed to convey precisely what the power of myth might be, while managing to pull the reader in. In a word, the perfect cover.
The lessons are many. One is that art takes work—but when something’s perfect, it’s perfect. Another is that people are often much more than what we read about them in books, or see in movies.
But mostly, from this publisher’s point of view, it’s that the perfect cover doesn’t tell or even show the reader what they’re going to get (though it has to make some clear promises about genre, etc.); it seduces us into wanting to read the book, and puts us in a mood where doing anything else is unthinkable.
The post Following Bliss: Joseph Campbell and Jackie appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
December 21, 2016
Wow! Keeping Time Kickstarter Funds 330%!
Stillpoint Digital Press’s Kickstarter campaign to complete Heather Albano’s steampunk time-travel adventure trilogy Keeping Time finished on December 20 with $3,325 in backing from 91 backers.
This enthusiastic response was over three times the amount Stillpoint and Albano’s goal.
Publisher David Kudler sent this message to the backers:
Thank you!
We crossed the finish line at 330% of our minimum goal.
Thanks to all of our backers — not only for supporting this project, which was a wonderful act of giving (that we look forward to rewarding!), but for sharing it with your friends.
We’ll be in touch in the coming days to get information so that we can send you your rewards. If you have any thoughts or questions, please do comment here.
Happy solstice, and happy holidays!
David Kudler & Heather Albano
PS If you missed out, worry not! You can still pre-order your copies of all three books at StillpointDigitalPress.com/Keeping-Time
About Keeping Time
You only THINK you know
what happened at Waterloo.
The real story involved more monsters.
And a lot more time travel.
“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312
Keeping Time: A Steampunk Time Travel Adventure Trilogy by Heather Albano
It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.
It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.
It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.
Are these events connected?
Oh, come now. That would be telling.
About Heather Albano
Heather Albano is a storyteller, history geek, and lover of both time-travel tropes and re-imaginings of older stories. You most likely know her from her game design work (which most recently included A Study In Steampunk, produced by Choice of Games, and contributions to TimeWatch and The Dracula Dossier, both published by Pelgrane Press)—but she writes non-interactive fiction too. Like the Keeping Time trilogy.
The post Wow! Keeping Time Kickstarter Funds 330%! appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
December 16, 2016
December 3, 2016
Kenneth Schneyer on Timepiece: Savor every bite
Kenneth Schneyer
We asked author Kenneth Schneyer to write a foreword to Heather Albano‘s forthcoming time-travel adventure novel Timepiece, which comes out January 3, 2017. What he wrote was so delightful, we thought we’d share it ahead of time!
Of course time travel represents an inversion of the way we experience the world. The arrow of entropy is reversed. People gain knowledge of the consequences of their actions before they take them. In this, it resembles both the prophecy story and the flashback: more than one author has imagined Tiresias and Cassandra as time travelers.
But there is another, more obvious yet subtle discontinuity: the time traveler finds herself in a place and time when and where her social instincts do not serve her. She experiences not culture shock, but past or future shock. The protagonist is a stranger in her own land.
Yet the form of the narrative has not often reflected this particular cognitive dissonance: H. G. Wells’s time traveler wrote like a Victorian, although he was catapulted into the future. David Gerrold’s Daniel Eakins spoke like a hip 1970s TV writer, though he was all over history. Even Connie Willis’s historian time travelers, who certainly experience social discomfort in the past, experience it as a late 20th or early 21st-century person would. True, some literary time travelers seem to be simply crazy or otherworldly because of their experiences, but their craziness isn’t that of another era, or at least not one that really happened.
In the novel before you, Heather Albano has capitalized on this literary quirk. Her time travelers are not contemporary or futuristic folk trying to sort themselves out in the Glorious Revolution. Instead they are Regency characters unexpectedly transported into a Victorian steampunk reality. In shorthand, they are Jane Austen characters in an H. G. Wells situation (or to be precise, an H. G. Wells and Mary Shelley situation!).
This provides Albano with an opportunity she clearly relishes, to critique Victorian values (as any responsible artist who writes steampunk must do) not from our oh-so-advanced 21st-century perspective but from the earlier (and perhaps more sensible?) viewpoint of the Napoleonic wars. At the same time, her protagonists see how the steampunk reality allows them some liberties that their Regency background would not. It is a textured and complex comparison of time periods. For this social conversation alone, the novel would be worth reading.
It also allows Albano to mess around delightfully with the literary conventions we have unconsciously absorbed. We’re used to thinking of the comedy of manners as arising out of the romance genre, where the wrong word or gesture means so much. In action-adventure tales, we expect our heroes to speak in broader, plainer terms, or else to wax poetic about their heroics, or to be grim and silent as in Hemingway. Only a few authors, such as Ellen Kushner in her “melodrama of manners” Swordspoint, manage to interpolate such interpersonal subtleties in to blood-and-guts action. But this book, as I have implied, is an H. G. Wells adventure that thinks it’s a Jane Austen novel. The violence, intrigue, and horror are often subordinated to the characters’ relationships and their difficulties understanding one another. I like this not only out of sheer perverse delight, but also because of the surprising note of realism it sounds. People don’t stop having social interactions, don’t stop being unnecessarily hurt or embarrassed by little things, just because they’re in the middle of a war and monsters are coming to get them.
Another treat is Albano’s use of “interludes” between chapters, out-of-sequence and sometimes seeming to involve utterly unrelated characters. Apart from the puzzle-solving fun they provide, they inspire meditation on the subjective nature of time travel. Just as Princess Irulan’s regular, infuriating propaganda-from-the-future in Frank Herbert’s Dune forces the reader to experience the chaos of Muad’Dib’s prophetic mind, Albano’s interludes invite the reader’s subjectivity into the sensation of having one’s ordinary flow of experience interrupted by the past or the future.
I could go on. I could gush about the exquisite research that has gone into the historical scenes, or the wry winks to various works probably familiar to the reader. I could talk about the serious philosophical conflict between the personal and the global, the private hurt and the public evil. But you have the book in your hands; the feast is before you. Savor every bite, and don’t forget I told you so.
Kenneth Schneyer is a Nebula-nominated author whose first collection, The Law & the Heart, was released by Stillpoint/Prometheus in 2014. He is also Professor of Humanities at Johnson & Wales University.
You only THINK you know what happened at Waterloo
The real story involved more monsters. And a lot more time travel.
Timepiece: A Steampunk Time-Travel AdventureIt’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.
It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.
It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.
Are these events connected?
Oh, come now. That would be telling.
Help us complete the Keeping Time trilogy!
Kickstarter campaign runs through December 20
Reserve your copies now and get special rewards
“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312
“Austen, meet Waterloo. When a genteel 1815 heiress is given a strange watch, she time-travels to an 1885 England where history has gone hideously wrong. Now she has to change it back to what it “should” have been—and that never works out well, does it? A delicious supercharged blend of steampunk and the Napoleonic Wars, with a thrill on every page.” — Sarah Smith, The Vanished Child
“If Jane Austen and Mary Shelley had locked H. G. Wells in a dungeon and revised his wildest work, the result would have been something like this rollicking steampunk time-travel adventure that still manages to be a comedy of manners. Albano’s delightful characters confront the not only monsters and killer robots, but their own divided loyalties between personal happiness and the fate of their country.” – Ken Schneyer, The Law & the Heart
Image: Hourglass by Rachel Caitlin (flickr.com). Used through a Creative Commons license.
The post Kenneth Schneyer on Timepiece: Savor every bite appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
November 29, 2016
Stillpoint launches Keeping Time Kickstarter
Stillpoint Digital Press has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help complete Heather Albano’s exciting Keeping Time trilogy of steampunk time-travel adventure novels.
Running until December 20, the Keeping Time Kickstarter campaign will underwrite the publication of new editions of the first two novels in the series, Timepiece and Timekeeper. Stillpoint plans to release these titles in 2017 in both ebook and print editions. In addition, January, 2018 will see the release of the previously unpublished conclusion of the series, Timebound.
Rewards for backing the campaign range from copies of the ebooks to copies of the paperback edition or the Kickstarter-exclusive hardcover edition — or even getting to name a character in the final book.
Praise for the Keeping Time series
“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312
“If Jane Austen and Mary Shelley had locked H. G. Wells in a dungeon and revised his wildest work, the result would have been something like this rollicking steampunk time-travel adventure that still manages to be a comedy of manners. Albano’s delightful characters confront the not only monsters and killer robots, but their own divided loyalties between personal happiness and the fate of their country.” – Ken Schneyer, The Law & the Heart
“Austen, meet Waterloo. When a genteel 1815 heiress is given a strange watch, she time-travels to an 1885 England where history has gone hideously wrong. Now she has to change it back to what it “should” have been—and that never works out well, does it? A delicious supercharged blend of steampunk and the Napoleonic Wars, with a thrill on every page.” — Sarah Smith, The Vanished Child
“This is the kind of ‘close your eyes, grab the wheel, press the accelerator’ science fiction that exploded from pulp paperbacks on drugstore racks back in the day.” — Grady Hendrix, Horrorstör
About Keeping Time
You only THINK you know what happened at Waterloo.
The real story involved more monsters. And a lot more time travel.
It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad scientist 25 years before.
It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.
It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.
Are these events connected?
Oh, come now. That would be telling.
About the Keeping Time Kickstarter Campaign
Help us complete the story!
In 2011, the steampunk time-travel novel Timepiece told the story of a girl, a pocket watch, Frankenstein’s monster, the Battle of Waterloo, and giant clockwork robots taking over London. The story continued with Timekeeper the following year. Now we have the chance to bring new editions of both – plus Timebound, the third book of the trilogy! – to the reading public. But do that, we need your help.
By “we,” you mean…?
Heather Albano is a storyteller, history geek, and lover of both time-travel tropes and re-imaginings of older stories. You most likely know her from her game design work (which most recently included A Study In Steampunk, produced by Choice of Games, and contributions to TimeWatch and The Dracula Dossier, both published by Pelgrane Press)—but she writes non-interactive fiction too. Like this trilogy.
David Kudler, publisher with Stillpoint Digital Press, is an editor as well as an author in his own right. He’s run the publications program for Joseph Campbell Foundation and managing editor of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell since 1999, overseeing the release over seventy books, ebooks, videos, and audio recordings, including Pathways to Bliss and the 2008 edition of Campbell’s seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He started Stillpoint Digital Press in 2012, where he’s published over sixty titles by eighteen authors — including Sail Away by WWII veteran Jack Beritzhoff, as well as his own recent YA historical novel Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale, both of which were successfully supported through Kickstarter campaigns.
And what is it you’re trying to do here?
We want to bring you new editions of Timepiece and Timekeeper, in PRINT this time as well as digital formats!
And we want to bring you a BRAND-NEW book, Timebound, which completes the trilogy and answers many of the questions raised by the first two.
And also involves time-traveling Nazis. Because really, who doesn’t want to defeat time-traveling Nazis?
How will my contribution help?
The first two books are written, and the third is underway. Your pre-order will help us finance:
Cover art
Proofreading
Layout and printing cost
Advance reviews (Yes, disgusting, isn’t it? Some of the major sources of book reviews charge small publishers simply to be reviewed.)
Inclusion in major catalogues, trade shows, etc.
And, you know, there are more stories to be told in this universe. Should we surpass our goal, Heather would take that as an indication of interest in said additional stories, and would move them further up on her to do list.
But one thing at a time.
No pun intended.
Timepiece, 2016 edition
The post Stillpoint launches Keeping Time Kickstarter appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
October 20, 2016
The Convertible Cloud: Ebook Conversion Online
This is the next in my on-going series of post on ebook creation; it focusses, obviously, on ebook conversion online. It was originally posted over at Joel Friedlander’s wonderful site for indie publishers, TheBookDesigner.com
The Convertible Cloud: Ebook Conversion Online
Previously, I’ve compared some of the computer apps that you can use to convert your manuscript into an ebook.
This month I’ll talk about online conversion tools — all of the ones I’m going to discuss are attached to the retailers and distributors that you are going to be interested in.
Eye of the Hurricane: Top Ebook Retailers
Let’s start with the most popular retailers and their conversion tools (or lack thereof).
Once again, I’m assuming that you’re in the US — which isn’t a given, I know. (Most of this information is true for non-US publishers as well.) Also, I’m defining “manuscript” as synonymous with “Microsoft Word document” (either .doc or .docx), since that’s the most common file format for authors to work with, and that’s the format I used in comparing the desktop conversion tools.
As before, these are the major retailers you will probably be looking at:
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
Apple’s iTunes Connect (iBooks Store)
Barnes & Noble’s Nook Press
Google Play
Rakuten’s Writing Life (Kobo)
They are the five largest ebook retailers in the US, and the sites I almost always recommend that clients upload to directly (rather than using a distributor). Three (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Rakuten/Kobo) have online conversion tools; Apple and Google only allow you to upload completed ebooks (ePub files), so they’re not going to be part of this discussion.
To compare the tools, I’m going to use the same chapter from my novel Risuko that I used to test the desktop apps — with one change: I’m adding two images — one centered and one inset on the right-hand side of the second paragraph — to test how the different sites handle pictures, in addition to text.
Here’s how the page looks in Word:
Note that the larger image is centered, while the smaller image of the woman playing the flute is flush with the right margin, and note the brush fonts that I used for the header and the drop cap. Note too that the body text is fully justified—the line down the right-hand margin is clean (except for where the paragraphs end).
Amazon
Publishing site: http://kdp.amazon.com
File formats accepted: ePub, Word doc/docx, HTML, mobi
File download: mobi, HTML
Edit online: None
Conversion fee: None
KDP is probably the most important retailer site for most self-publishers, and so we’ll start here.
You can upload files in a number of formats to KDP: Kindle’s native mobi format, the universal ePub format, HTML, a PDF[*], and, of course, our friend the Word doc.
When you create a new title on KDP, the metadata and content entry all happens on the first page. The last item on the page is:
Click the Browse button, find your file, hit the Upload button, and within a few minutes, the page will offer you the choice either to preview the converted ebook or to download the mobi file. The best way to test an ebook is to download the file and load it onto a Kindle — preferably several, ideally of different generations (i.e., old-style Kindle, Paperwhite, Kindle Fire) and a couple of different apps (Kindle for Android/iOS/Mac/Windows). The online previewer and Kindle Previewer app will, however, do a pretty good job of showing you how the book will look on various Kindles/Kindle apps.
Here’s our file viewed on the online previewer, emulating a Fire:
Not bad. The pretty brush fonts went away, but the images are placed and sized properly, the text is correctly justified, and the line-space remains consistent. If I could, I’d play with the size of the drop cap (it’s four lines high instead of three, and it’s set slightly below the level of the top line), but I can’t, so I’d live with it.[†]
I checked the file on a number of other Kindles; quality was acceptable on most (though on several the inset image was miniscule), except for the Kindle for iOS app, and my old Kindle DX, which looked like this:
The drop cap went away, the first paragraph is indented, and the inset image was simply placed on a line of its own before the paragraph. These aren’t conversion problems, per se; old Kindles and Kindle for iOS display a version of the mobi file (MOBI7) that is based on old PalmPilot technology; it can’t handle sophisticated formatting at all. There are some things that you can do (involving media queries) that will allow you to format the same file differently for old (MOBI7) and new (KF8) Kindles; however you can’t do that from Word. To make that magic happen, you’ll need to create an ePub file, edit it, and upload it.
KDP doesn’t have an online edit function, nor can you edit the downloaded mobi file directly.[‡] KDP does, however, allow you to download the ebook as an HTML file, which you can edit.
Barnes and Noble
Publishing site: http://nookpress.com
File formats accepted: ePub, Word doc/docx, HTML, TXT (plain text)
File download: None
Edit online: Some
Conversion fee: None
Barnes and Noble’s NookPress has a somewhat idiosyncratic system for setting up new titles; the ebook conversion online, however, is pretty good, and it allows you to edit the file online.
After creating a new title (by hitting the Create New Project button on the home page), the first screen allows you to upload your manuscript:[§]
Once you’ve uploaded the Word doc (or other file), you can preview the conversion online — and edit, to a certain extent.
Here’s what the conversion looked like in the Nook for Web previewer:
The images are properly placed and (more or less) sized. Notice that some but not all of the fonts display properly. Notice too that the line-spacing for the first paragraph is much tighter than the others. Also, the first paragraph retains full justification, but the following paragraphs are aligned to the left.
When I click on the aA button at the top of the screen (that being the fairly universal ebook “display preferences” sign), I was allowed to deselect the “Use Publisher Defaults” preference, and ironically most of the problems went away:
Unfortunately, you can’t get the ebook to automatically deselect “Use Publisher Defaults” from Word — and you could get the file to display properly by uploading a properly formatted ePub file.
You can use the online “Edit Manuscript” function to work on the converted ebook, but mostly the tools are for very simple formatting. You can’t edit the underlying HTML, nor can you download the converted ebook to edit yourself.
Kobo
Publishing site: http://writinglife.kobobooks.com
File formats accepted: ePub, PDF (which can be created from Word docs on both Mac and PC by using the Print command)
Edit online: Some
File download: ePub
Conversion fee: None
Kobo’s conversion online has some nice qualities, and some that are a little head-scratching.
When you create a new title, the first screen asks you to enter most of the metadata (title, author, categories, description, keywords, ISBN, etc.). On the second page, you’re asked to upload the manuscript and — once it’s uploaded, you’re allowed to download and edit:
Great! Unfortunately, here’s what the conversion looked like when I downloaded the file and opened it in iBooks:
Eek! There’s not a whole lot to like about this. The fonts didn’t convert, the paragraph spacing is awful, the drop cap went away (although the intitial W is still spaced from the next letter), the images aren’t there — and even if they were, they’d be in the wrong places. (That little blue square with the question mark is telling me that there’s a missing image. Which one? Don’t know.)
Okay: the words are all there and the text is all full justified.
When I opened the Edit function, things looked a little better. Here’s the chapter head:
The first image shows up — it’s huge, but it’s there. The fonts appear. Unfortunately, the paragraph spacing is still a problem and the drop cap still… doesn’t:
And the missing image still… is:
So, still not good. The online editing tools are a bit more sophisticated than NookPress’s, but there’s still no way to change the paragraph formatting or figure out what’s wrong with the second image, and no access to the underlying HTML.
I was able to open up the downloaded ePub file in Sigil and could fix most of the formatting — but if I’m going to do that, I think I’d rather use a conversion tool like Calibre or Jutoh that doesn’t lose images and doesn’t randomly reformat everything.
Cumulus Conversion: Other Online Options
A number of the smaller retailers and distributors will accept and convert your Word doc. To be honest, some of them provide a better conversion experience, and will give you a final ebook — perhaps in multiple formats — that you can use.
And since most of them will help you sell your books on some or all of the major retailers, you may decide to start with them. Here are the two I’m going to discuss (in alphabetical order):
Draft2Digital
Smashwords
There are others; these are the ones with which I have had direct experience, don’t charge, and are most widely used.[**] If you’ve had experience with other distributors or online ebook conversion tools, please share your experience in the comments!
Here they are:
Draft2Digital (D2D)
Publishing site: http://draft2digital.com
File formats accepted: ePub, Word doc/docx, RTF — “anything Word can read”
Edit online: None
File download: ePub, mobi, PDF
Conversion/membership fee: $0
A lot of indie author/publishers swear by Draft2Digital because it can serve as a one-stop-shop for book distribution (almost). Once you’ve uploaded your Word file, D2D will convert it into a mobi file that can go to Amazon, an ePub that can go to Apple, B&N, and the rest, and a PDF that can go to CreateSpace, for distribution to Amazon as a print-on-demand paper-and-ink book.
When you create a new title, the very first thing that you have to do (on the Acquisitions pane) is to upload your manuscript:
Once you’ve done that and entered all of the metadata, etc., the conversion is fairly smooth. There’s no online preview, but you can download the book in either ePub, mobi, or PDF formats. Here’s the converted ePub file for our chapter:
Hmm. Not as bad as the Kobo conversion. Everything’s in more or less the right place, the images are both the right size, and the body text looks fairly clean.
On the other hand, the drop cap is totally out of position, the brush fonts were dropped, and the second image (the flautist) is displayed in-line at the beginning of the paragraph, not inset to the right.
These problems are all relatively easy to take care of — if you open up the file in Sigil or Calibre and play with the CSS stylesheets. Still, as with the others, it seems to me that if I have to do that, then I probably shouldn’t bother using their conversion tool and should upload my own finished ePub file.
Smashwords
Publishing site: http://smashwords.com
File formats accepted: ePub, Word doc (not docx)
Edit online: None
File download: ePub, mobi, PDF, PDB, lit, TXT, and many more
Conversion/membership fee: $0
Although they don’t distribute to Amazon, this is the distributor I use the most to reach a lot of the more hard-to-reach retailers and library suppliers.
Their ebook conversion engine, the famous Meatgrinder, is in fact a proprietary version of the open-source engine behind Calibre. It will take in a Word document and output a wide variety of formats.
The file-upload button is the last thing you find when you click on the Publish button to create a new title:
Once you’ve filled in all of the metadata and uploaded the manuscript and the cover art, the Meatgrinder will churn away at your file; depending on how large your document is and how many folks are trying to upload at the same time, it can take from a few seconds to a few minutes.
Here’s the result of converting our test chapter:
Again — hmm. The drop cap is there and, while a bit smaller than in the original, looks okay. The first image is correctly positioned, though too big. The second image, however, rather than appearing to the right of the second paragraph, overlaps the chapter head. At least it’s the right size.
A couple of things: Smashwords used to be very restrictive about formatting if you were planning on distributing to other retailers. They’ve loosened up on that front considerably, allowing fonts larger than 18pt, for example, and more colored text. Still, there are limitations to this kind of conversion — as we’ve seen in nearly every case.
Cloudy Conclusions
As I suggested at the end of the post on desktop conversion apps, none of these online conversion tools works quite well enough for me to count on. KDP came the closest, but even in that case, I’d rather upload an ePub file for KDP to convert to a mobi ebook that will display properly on both older and newer Kindles and apps.
Now, admittedly, I chose a slightly complex manuscript that was intended to test the capabilities of the conversion engines. If you eliminated the drop cap, the two images, and the brush font from the chapter-header style, all of the tools would have managed more than passably. There might have been other errors — in my experience there frequently are — but if you’ve given your manuscript the bare minimum when it comes to formatting, they might serve you just fine. They’d also have looked pretty boring.
Next time, I’m going to give a quick rundown of the basic HTML and CSS (stylesheet code) that will help you look at your own ebook after conversion online, and then, in the following post, I’m going to talk you through my ebook-creation workflow.
[*] Amazon strongly recommends against uploading PDFs; so do I. It leads to a really messy looking ebook, with a number of problems that you can’t do anything about since PDFs aren’t (easily) editable — and neither are mobi files.
[†] I did have to play with the formatting of the second image in Word to get it to display properly here and in the other conversion tools. I had to make sure that the image was positioned flush to the right margin and anchored to the text; simply placing the paragraph where I wanted it in Word led to all kinds of weird effects.
[‡] You could use an app like Jutoh or Calibre to convert it to ePub and then edit that, but if you were going to go that route why use the online converter in the first place?
[§] Also to type/copy-and-paste it straight in!
[**] Three that I considered including: Aer.io/Aerbooks, Booqla, and BookBaby. Aer.io won’t accept Word docs; while BookBaby charges for conversion, which I thought would make them less attractive to most readers; and Booqla (a Swedish ebook retailer/distributor), while a promising platform, wasn’t able to convert the modestly compex Word file that I was testing. Nonetheless, all three offer many advantages aside from ebook conversion online (the subject of this post), and so I do recommend that you check them out!
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The post The Convertible Cloud: Ebook Conversion Online appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
October 4, 2016
Join in the YA Scavenger Hunt with David Kudler!
Risuko author David Kudler invites you to participate in the fall 2016 edition of YASH, a scavenger hunt/blog hop across the websites of over a hundred terrific authors of young-adult books! Enter to free books, pick up lots of exclusive free content, and add some exciting new books to your to-be-read list!
Go to David’s Risuko blog and check out his entry, which includes some content provided by Sherri L. Smith, award-winning author of Pasadena, a stunning new exploration of the dark under-belly of even the sunniest lives.
Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale
Can One Girl Win A War?
Though Japan has been devastated by a century of civil war, Risuko just wants to climb trees. Growing up far from the battlefields and court intrigues, the fatherless girl finds herself pulled into a plot that may reunite Japan — or may destroy it. She is torn from her home and what is left of her family, but finds new friends at a school that may not be what it seems.
Magical but historical, Risuko follows her along the first dangerous steps to discovering who she truly is.
Historical adventure fiction appropriate for young adult and middle-grade readers
“Tight, exciting, and thoughtful… The characters are nicely varied and all the pieces fit into place deftly” — Kirkus Reviews
“It is easy to invest in the characters, and once the reader starts this book, it’s almost impossible to put it down. Risuko goes through a lot of character growth throughout the book. An entertaining story with excellent writing and haunting descriptions, a relatable heroine, and fast-paced writing.” — InD’tale Magazine
Can One Girl Win A War?
My name is Kano Murasaki, but everyone calls me Risuko. Squirrel.
I am from Serenity Province, though I was not born there.
My nation has been at war for a hundred years, Serenity is under attack and the Kano family is in disgrace, but some people think that I can bring victory. That I can be a very special kind of woman.
All I want to do is climb.
My name is Kano Murasaki, but everyone calls me Squirrel.
Risuko.
—
Though Japan has been devastated by a century of civil war, Risuko just wants to climb trees. Growing up far from the battlefields and court intrigues, the fatherless girl finds herself pulled into a plot that may reunite Japan — or may destroy it. She is torn from her home and what is left of her family, but finds new friends at a school that may not be what it seems.
Magical but historical, Risuko follows her along the first dangerous steps to discovering who she truly is.
Kano Murasaki, called Risuko (Squirrel) is a young, fatherless girl, more comfortable climbing trees than down on the ground. Yet she finds herself enmeshed in a game where the board is the whole nation of Japan, where the pieces are armies, moved by scheming lords, and a single girl couldn’t possible have the power to change the outcome. Or could she?
Historical adventure fiction appropriate for young adult and middle-grade readers
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The post Join in the YA Scavenger Hunt with David Kudler! appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
September 28, 2016
Signing: Risuko Author David Kudler to Read at Book Passage
On Monday, October 3, author/publisher David Kudler will read from his new teen novel Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale at the Left Coast Writers monthly salon. In addition to sharing sections of the book, he will discuss the process of publishing his first novel. The salon takes place at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Copies of the book will available, and he will be signing as well.
David Kudler is an author, editor, and publisher living just north of San Francisco, California with his wife, teacher/author Maura Vaughn, his author-to-be daughters, and their (apparently) non-literary cats. He’s proud to serve as vice president of Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA).
David is best known as the editor of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His children’s picture book The Seven Gods of Luck was adapted from a Japanese folktale. Two books that he edited for Joseph Campbell Foundation (Sake & Satori and Myths of Light) explore Japanese mythology and religion. He has written about places other than Japan — but his imagination keeps returning to the Land of the Rising Sun.
A published author, he has recently released Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale, his young-adult historical adventure novel, in June, 2016. Set in sixteenth century Japan, Risuko follows the adventures of a young woman pulled into a plot that may reunite a war-torn Japan — or may destroy it.
For more information and to sign up:
Literary Salon: David Kudler
LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: David Kudler, Indie Publisher and Author of Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale
Monday, October 3rd, 2016 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera ||
www.bookpassage.com
The post Signing: Risuko Author David Kudler to Read at Book Passage appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.
