Sunday, 21 September 2014

Giveaway!

To celebrate 500 likes on Facebook I have prizes!

Come say Hi on my Facebook page www.facebook.com/deadlyexpectations and click on the giveaway tab or just click the link



Sunday, 14 September 2014

Epubs make me nuts!

So just when I thought I had it all figured out when it comes to which online retailer wants what when it comes to submitting my books I found out there's even more to learn.

Hubs used to put my ePubs together using Quark Express. It was a bit of an ugly task, building each chapter in pieces so we could insert a little picture or bit of artwork here and there, but we always got it to work.

That's until I tried to build a boxed set. It seems a boxed set has far too many words for Quark and my computer to remain stable. We needed another option so decided to give Pages on my Mac a try. The epub export worked great.

Well, sorry of. I found uploading a valid ePub to Goodreads using Safari doesn't work. Goodreads automated checker finds the file invalid. If you upload the same ePub using a windows computer it works just fine. Okay, I can work with that.

Then came the upgrade to Mavericks. Now my pages ePubs don't work on Kobo but with iTunes they're fine. After a few days of repeatedly up loading, Kobo said there was an unmatched <apple> tag in the ePub. Nothing I could do about that so went back to the old version of Pages.

This weekend I published all my books on Google Play and found the old pages ePub can't be 'cleansed'.

Sigh, so I copy my old pages version (since that works on Kobo) into new Pages, rebuild my TOC and publish to Google Play. (live there now, hint, hint, if you haven't picked up one of my books yet)

So here's the rundown.

iTunes - likes ePubs from Pages on either Snow Leopard or Mavericks
Kobo - ePubs from the old pages on Snow Leopard
Google Play - ePubs from the new Pages
Goodreads - just don't upload it from your Mac.

That's my experience.