Mobipocket…Kindle no more

So, I got an email from Mobipocket, this month of October 2010, stating that, soon, they are no longer going to provide publishing for distribution in the Kindle Store. And what does this mean? This means I have to go directly to “Amazon’s premier Kindle publishing channel” to the The Digital Text Platform (DTP). This also means more learning curve on my part.

I have to now look at my html settings in MobiPocket and see if DTP supports them. So far, after a few days of looking at what’s supported in DTP, I then had to look to see if the “not so common” html that I first found listed was also supported. For example, page breaks. I learned from Mobipocket to include “” which I did before each chapter (without the quotes “” of course). Fortunately, it is supported in DTP.

Unfortunately, my Mobipocket version had too many other things that just wasn’t cutting it for me, which meant, I had to make my book over from scratch. I had to copy and paste each individual chapter into my Dreamweaver and then go back and find the paragraphs that were in italics that didn’t transfer over. Then there were spaces in between words since what I copied was “justified” instead of “align left” for my paragraphs. Sigh. It was a long day that I did on a vacation day (Daughter in daycare and hubby at work). Fortunately, I only had to do this for The Made. My other two books (Irid and Ruby, Flesh & Heart) were perfect. That’s probably because I had did them from scratch as well instead of having MobiPocket conversion do it for me.

Thinking positively, this was also an opportunity to fix some mistakes that was found in my book The Made. My husband read it off of Kindle using his cellular phone from an app he downloaded (I was so happy that he read my book :). He doesn’t read books). Like my Chapter 27, which, for some reason had the wrong title! Ugh! It Had “Town of Donwick”, which, by the way, is Chapter 14, when it should have been titled “Sick”.

Why so many mistake in The Made? Well, with Irid. and Ruby, Flesh & Heart., I read and re-read and read some more during my maternity leave in it’s printed format. Sitting at home with nothing to do but breastfeed a baby every 90 minutes, I had to do something. So, I looked over my books and got them ready for publishing. I didn’t do this with my first book. And working on two books at a time during my maternity leave didn’t leave me room for my first baby, The Made. The Made is a pretty darn big book and reviewing it over would take some time. But until then, with self publishing, I can edit and upload as I go.

Michael R. Hicks, who I follow along with his self-publishing steps, puts his books in ebook formats first, and then follows it with a paperback version. That’s easier to get all those mistakes out before putting it into a book format. I think I just might do that with my next books.

Until next time 🙂

Oh, and yeah…. Have a Happy Halloween