Well, so much for my intentions not to check on the status of my Kindle Scout campaign for The Disembodied. Full disclosure: I have been checking daily.
And, I mean daily.
The first two days I was listed as “new”. Then, I spent portions of the next six days in “Hot and Trending”. The total number of hours (in H and T) was 88. Not huge, as many authors spend all the time – that is, 24 hours – from the get-go. Sadly, interest in The Disembodied has waned over the last two days as I am no longer in H & T. Sigh. I’m still plugging away, though, with social media. Maybe something will happen.
Overzealous as I tend to be, I misread the instructions for the Kindle Scout campaign. They, the Kindle Scout people, mention to have to have your book professionally edited. I did that—actually I had two different editors—but I thought that meant getting your book formatted in mobi format to upload to the Kindle Scout site.
Nope. It turns out that Kindle wanted a Word version uploaded. I, however, pushed ahead with the whole shebang. Since I wanted a print version as well, the editor prepped the book into pdf format. Then, we started with preparing the book for conversion to Kindle format—the mobi format.
It was at this stage that my editor noticed that Kindle requires you to upload the Word version for the campaign. However, I no longer had that since the manuscript, with all accompanied editorial changes, was now a pdf file.
The folks from The Editorial Department who were doing the line editing tried two different programs to convert pdf files back into Word. There were numerous conversion errors with both, but I took the one with the fewer errors. That didn’t mean, however, that there were only a few conversion errors. For instance, one annoying conversion error was the joining of two lines of dialogue (from two different characters) into one line. So, lines like the following:
“Do you think it’ll snow?”
“Sure feels like it,” Shelley said.
Turned into:
“Do you think it’ll snow?” “Sure feels like it,” Shelley said.
You’d be surprised how often that happened. Or, maybe you wouldn’t. Anyway, I was able to save the converted Word version as a second Word version—and for some reason that was easier to revise for the Kindle Scout upload.
Lo and behold, though, after I uploaded the book, it turns out I missed some additional conversion errors… right in the first 5000 words that everyone sees. Amazingly, the Kindle people were really helpful. They went into the document and made the changes.
Now, though, I’ve been finding some more…
And, I mean daily.
The first two days I was listed as “new”. Then, I spent portions of the next six days in “Hot and Trending”. The total number of hours (in H and T) was 88. Not huge, as many authors spend all the time – that is, 24 hours – from the get-go. Sadly, interest in The Disembodied has waned over the last two days as I am no longer in H & T. Sigh. I’m still plugging away, though, with social media. Maybe something will happen.
Overzealous as I tend to be, I misread the instructions for the Kindle Scout campaign. They, the Kindle Scout people, mention to have to have your book professionally edited. I did that—actually I had two different editors—but I thought that meant getting your book formatted in mobi format to upload to the Kindle Scout site.
Nope. It turns out that Kindle wanted a Word version uploaded. I, however, pushed ahead with the whole shebang. Since I wanted a print version as well, the editor prepped the book into pdf format. Then, we started with preparing the book for conversion to Kindle format—the mobi format.
It was at this stage that my editor noticed that Kindle requires you to upload the Word version for the campaign. However, I no longer had that since the manuscript, with all accompanied editorial changes, was now a pdf file.
The folks from The Editorial Department who were doing the line editing tried two different programs to convert pdf files back into Word. There were numerous conversion errors with both, but I took the one with the fewer errors. That didn’t mean, however, that there were only a few conversion errors. For instance, one annoying conversion error was the joining of two lines of dialogue (from two different characters) into one line. So, lines like the following:
“Do you think it’ll snow?”
“Sure feels like it,” Shelley said.
Turned into:
“Do you think it’ll snow?” “Sure feels like it,” Shelley said.
You’d be surprised how often that happened. Or, maybe you wouldn’t. Anyway, I was able to save the converted Word version as a second Word version—and for some reason that was easier to revise for the Kindle Scout upload.
Lo and behold, though, after I uploaded the book, it turns out I missed some additional conversion errors… right in the first 5000 words that everyone sees. Amazingly, the Kindle people were really helpful. They went into the document and made the changes.
Now, though, I’ve been finding some more…
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