Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Love Writing. Hate Formatting.

I hate formatting. HATE. IT. With a passion. Why - in this day and age - can't someone come up with a program that will take a basic Word document and change it into an eBook? I know, some of it has to do with the fact that Amazon uses Mobi and Barnes and Noble uses ePub. But, come on, people!

I have changed my Word document into everything possible and uploaded it and something is always messed up. I've gone back through my books and fixed anything that looked funny and most of the time it STILL looks funny. My main problem are the indents. They are all messed up!

Now, I've uploaded to B&N, and when looking at the sample, it looks fine. But, I can't see further into the book. So, you download the ePub version of it and their Nook reader for computers, and then what happens, all the chapters are messed up on the top! UGH!

The other thing giving me trouble is formatting a table of contents. I had one that when you clicked on it went to the chapter, but the page numbers are wrong (they are okay on the Word document), but not okay on the eBooks because the pages are different. So, I took the page numbers out, but now I can't get them linked to the chapters.

I've tried some free programs, I've downloaded a free trial of Adobe's ridiculously expensive Indesign. Nothing helps.

Love writing. Hate formatting.

2 comments:

  1. Have you tried talking to software person to get their take on it?

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  2. My husband knows a lot and he tries to help me. This particular problem I think had to do with something in Word. I finally fixed that and it uploaded to B&N okay, but when I went to upload it to Amazon, the preview looked funny. I figured out, though, that it was Amazon's problem, not mine.

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