THE Group for Authors! discussion

Hi I have just joined this group. I've got 2 books on Goodreads that are both self-published ebooks. I won't mention their names in case that's promoting!

I linked my blog (on Blogger) to my profile and one post is showing up here as gobblegook (or it could be HTML.)
Does anyone know, if it's okay to edit it by pasting the content from the original into the Goodreads version, or will that cause even more problems?

Yvonne, I checked your post. I use Blogger too, and I encountered something similar. What you're seeing is formatting code.

I'm guessing you drafted the text in Word? It throws all kinds of invisible junk into the file that confuses the Goodreads blogging program to the point where it can't even recognize its own HTML code.

Try editing out (in Goodreads) the font information at the beginning, up to the first line of text, and see if that helps. If not, you can paste the text from the original, just don't select the first and last characters in the file. Type those in manually. And you may have to reenter the line breaks, italics, etc.

For the future, it works best to use a plain text editor to create text for Blogger.

Thanks C.P., that's really helpful. I'll try your suggestions.

Yes, I did do this post in Word - I haven't done with most of the others, but this one was long and complex, so it was easier that way. If I do any more in Word I'll do them as plain text (normal) and do any formatting in Blogger. That works for Smashwords, so it should work here too.

Word will still record the junk as part of the file (it's not really junk but Word's instructions to itself). Unless it cuts that out if you save the file as TXT. It may.

I write my posts in TextEdit, which comes free with Macs. Not sure what the equivalent is for a Windows machine. BBEdit? Notepad? (Does Windows still have Notepad? I haven't used it in 15 years.)

Anyway, I'm sure you'll figure it out. Good luck!

I'm on a Mac so will try TextEdit. Thanks again.