it's all about the waiting now

I've spent all day (and it's now technically Monday) finalizing my ebook manuscript, and I've uploaded the ms plus the front-cover art. Monday, I'm going to tear my attention away from the book so I can bake some cookies as a belated Buddha's Birthday gesture to our building's concierges and our grocery-store staff, who are almost all very friendly and helpful (except for one strange-looking lady who seems a little, uh, avoidant).

The process to upload a manuscript as a Kindle doc is complicated. First, you open the Kindle Create app on your desktop. Next, inside the app, you find the MS Word document that you want to convert to Kindle Create format. Hit "convert." Next, you have to comb through the converted document to unfuck all of the formatting fuckups in a 400-plus-page manuscript. This takes hours, and these errors can be anything from unnecessary font-size changes for chapter titles to text-alignment problems not found in the original document but generated simply by the act of converting the file from MS Word to Kindle. You are, of course, creating a "reflowable text" document from what had originally been a "fixed text" document, which may be one reason for all of the conversion problems.

After hours staring at your document and correcting all of those little errors, you must next export your Kindle document to its final format: KPF (also known as .kpf). That's right: Just because you converted your doc to the Kindle Create file format doesn't mean your file is ready for upload! The beast must assume its final form! So, .kpf it is.

Once that final conversion is done, and your cover art has the proper dpi and dimensions and file format (300dpi .jpg in this case, 1600 × 2560 so it looks good on tablets), you may now go to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and start the product-uploading process. Select "ebook" as the thing to upload, then enter the title, author, and ISBN information. Click off the SEO categories and subcategories by which to find your book, then start uploading (by the way, this is only a rough description of the process; I'm tired, so I'm not going to retrace it/relive it step by step). My cover art uploaded just fine, but when I uploaded my .kpf-formatted manuscript, I got a flag saying there were at least fifteen spelling errors.

I guess Amazon wants to make sure every ms it receives is letter-perfect to protect its company image. Whatever AI the company is using, though, is awesome. My own piece-of-shit MS Word for Mac did a final run-through evaluation of my document and told me there were no spelling errors at all, which turned out to be a load of shit. So I opened up the Kindle Create version of my document, the MS Word version, and activated the online Kindle previewer, which showed me every single spelling error it had caught. And wow, were some of those errors old. I know I make typos all the time, especially after my stroke, but fifteen, even in a 400-plus-page document, seems a little shameful. Still, I was too wowed by the Amazon AI's awesomeness to feel guilty. If anything, I was glad the errors had been caught: You don't want to look like a fool when you're first publishing something. Quality control matters.

Using the Amazon Kindle previewer and error-finder as my guide, I then proceeded to correct (1) the uploaded .kpf manuscript showing in my preview screen, (2) the Kindle Create version of the ms on my desktop, and (3) the MS Word version, which I need in order to make the PDF for the dead-tree version of my book (out in a month, I hope). The process of correcting errors in all three documents took another two hours, but when I hit "upload changes," the .kpf document successfully uploaded this time. Cue my sigh of relief.

There was more stuff to fill out and enter, then the flag came up saying my book would take up to 72 hours to appear and be on sale. In my experience, ebooks appear a lot faster than 72 hours. All the same, I'll be sure to announce it when it shows up (it hasn't yet). It'll doubtless be there when I wake up in the morning.

There's already one little change that I saw I'd need to make (copyright page—not a major thing), so I'm going to have to reupload the revised .kpf file once the book is out (you can't reupload before then). Come to think of it, I'll do the reupload first before announcing that the book is out. It makes little sense to have customers buy the book before it's completely ready (even though changes can be made to the book even after a purchase, and the revisions will appear in the purchased ebook copy).

Oh, yeah—someone else bought a copy of my Think Like a Teacher ebook.