When someone suggests that ‘maybe you should have someone format your ebook for you’, it would be wise to consider their words carefully. It’s not that they’re very informative words. In fact as far as words go, not to mention how comments from people you trust go, they’re a little condescending and deflating. They imply, whether intended or not, that you are not capable of wielding the wizardly powers required for computer usage – that, while you may have stories tucked away in your little head, they do not translate to the kind of practical skills necessary for building the kind of Frankensteinian monster that an ebook necessarily is.  

Heed their words.

Because they might be right.

I consider myself to be computer literate. I know that there are various languages used by different programs. I know that these languages don’t always translate very well. I know that there are keyboard shortcuts to simplify my navigation of different programs and that these shortcuts are not always the same between programs. I am aware that there is some impressive data translation going on, and that, much like that moment when Neo asks Cypher if he always looks at the Matrix ‘in code’, I am the opposite.

I do not look at code.

Or, let me rephrase, I did not look at code.

Even the most rudimentary knowledge of HTML would be better than none when approaching ebook creation. I have rudimentary knowledge insofar as I know that HTML is a thing, and that it makes webpages look amazing or shitty on some level. I do not pretend that I understand it – because I don’t.

All of this meant that when I flippantly disregarded the suggestion that I should get help when reformatting my book, I did so with the kind of blind confidence that only an idiot can achieve.

What I expected to be a few hours of text-alignment and font adjustment turned into arduous days spent chasing errors that I didn’t understand.

See, I was smart – or so I thought.

I’d done a little reading about Kindle files (.mobi files) and I’d discovered that I needed to strip all the formatting from my document before trying to create a book for Amazon. This meant that I’d spent the time stripping it all back. And then I’d spent even more time manually italicising the hundreds of singular words scattered throughout my little novel. It was not an enjoyable task – but I felt it to be worthwhile.

What I didn’t realise was that creating an ebook file of any kind (.mobi or .epub) required a conversion program.

My wife suggested that I accustom myself with InDesign because we were lucky enough to have a subscription for Adobe’s counter-intuitive design tool.

 She is a wiz with InDesign.

Actually, she’s kind of a wiz with all of Adobe’s programs.

Me? I just like to make stuff look pretty but I get frustrated if I can’t just wave the mouse around to achieve it. Working with InDesign made me feel like a Neanderthal grasping at a mobile phone – I was sure that it was meant to be amazing and do all sorts of wonderful things, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, work out how to make those things occur.

I wasted hours making the mouse spin in tiny circles while I pondered the secret meaning of digital book creation. I considered the various kinds of blood magic I might familiarise myself with in order to pass the dastardly task off to someone more professional but less free. In the end I started to get a feel for the whole thing. I realised that page breaks in a word document acted a little differently in InDesign. I discovered styles – although it was a long time before I understood what they were really for. And eventually I exported my first attempt at the ebook.

Of course – it didn’t quite work the way it was meant to.

It crashed iBooks.

It crashed Kobo.

And it crashed Kindle.

For a little while I thought it might have even broken my iPad – which, now that I think about it, could have been a costly literary experience for a budding novelist.

I managed to get the iPad working again with a forced reset and I set about researching why this kind of thing might have happened.

It turns out that InDesign secretly adds things to your .epub when you export it. I say secretly, but really the additions are only secretive because of my limited knowledge of how the whole process works. In fact, they’re probably about as secret as the fact that a bear will maim you if you put your hand in its mouth and force its jaw to make chewing movements. Once you know that things that go in a bear’s mouth generally get eaten, then there’s no secret. InDesign adds little phrases to the HTML of the .epub which relate to paragraph formatting and font allocation. Some readers – or so I discovered with the help of a rudimentary-looking but extremely useful program called ‘calibre’ – don’t like the things that InDesign adds.

Some ebook readers want to vomit them right back up.

They choke on them – coughing and spluttering and crashing all over the proverbial floor.

A little HTML later (read: randomly deleting anything that shows up as an error in the file) and iBooks could finally dance with the elusive ‘Swann’.

By no means was this process a precision event. However, I’m sure that it will take barely a quarter of the time to do it all again when I set myself to the task for Book Two. But, really, that was part of the reason that ‘Swann’ made it out into the waiting arms of the public (you were waiting, weren’t you? I’ll cry if you weren’t). ‘Swann’ was a test run.

And I’m glad that we did it with something so short because Book Two is more than three times the length of ‘Swann’.

Regardless, I now consider myself an apprentice wizard at the school of .epub creation.

I have developed knowledge of secret powers, and now they are mine to wield like fire and lightning.

And I will wield them… To the absolute best of my limited ability.

-P