Thursday, May 26, 2011

Ereaders and epubs.

For my birthday I got an ereader that also acts a lot like a tablet. It's a whole lot of fun to play with, but the thing that I've been using it for the most so far is checking the epub files for my own book. This has been shockingly difficult. I had created my print copy of the book in InDesign, thinking that it would just be a matter of exporting as an epub to create an ebook. Was I ever wrong.

I've been using InDesign for about 6 years now (that's really scary to think about) and this project forced me to use more options than I have ever used before. One of the big ones was paragraph styles. I know, I know, I probably should have been using these before, but it was never necessary before. For an epub, you lose all formating, including tabs, unless you set it as a paragraph setting.

After spending several hours making changes and checking them on my ereader, I think I'm at a point where I'm happy with how it will look. The sad part is the limitations in fonts. I can't do anything fancy for the chapter heading, and I have a small section where the characters pass notes where I can't change the fonts to make the handwriting look different, which I have for the print copy.

I have almost finished with the print copy edits. I'm hoping to send that to the printer tonight. (YAY) and then it's just a couple of weeks before I get that back and can order the final copies of the book. Soon I'll be able to focus on writing again. And marketing.

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