Phew ... the first eight ebooks finally cranked out
I’ve spent the last six years documenting my travels on an almost daily basis, and throwing up plenty of the writing on my various websites and blogs.
Finally I’ve managed a period remaining stationary, my two widescreen monitors having sufficient real estate to really assist the compilation of these disjoint snippets into something approaching coherence in a series of ebooks.
I have had to learn another program, Calibre, to edit the XHTML, there’s a few tricks up in the head section and the font embedment procedure, but once you learn the 1-2-3-4 for the initial book and crank out a basic CSS stylesheet, it’s easy enough to follow that template with the rest. Occasionally when I’ve worked something new out I’ve been going back to adjust the other books.
There was a certain madness with publishing a 95k word and 60k word e-book on the same day, 6 July to be precise, but since then I’ve actually had the full eight e-books in the air simultaneously. A case of ensuring that modifications to the template for one book for whatever reason, was carried over to the others, ie, make them belong to the same family of forms.
Seems sensible to have a major coherence and look for the books, the house style, kind of like what I’ve done with my own websites. A certain familiarity is useful, from productivity, no need to redesign the wheel for each book, the same base fonts, font size, just a variation of colour, and the appropriate text and images. I guess it helps with marketing when there’s a level of recognition as well.
So eight e-books more or less down, another two stories ready to go.
But rather than crack those out I’m itching to get out there, despite the supposedly wintery nature down at 41ºS currently. I kinda need some additional “research” for tramping.co.nz, fill in some gaps in the coverage, ready for the summer season which is not so far away.