Dear Diary,
After a solid week of experimenting with different eBook converters I have developed a new and startling twitch at the corner of my left eye. The Orange Beast informs me that this twitch is really my subconscious reminding me that my beautiful cat is starving from a lack of soft food.
Hard food be damned, he wants that soft food and he wants it now.
I believe it comes from not being able to transfer an epub document from Calibre onto my iPad. I’m pretty sure that’s where it started anyway. It might have come from hunting for all the weird transcription errors that transferred between Word 2010 and Open Office.
There is a part of me that feels dirty having so many different word processors on my computer now. I’ve used Microsoft Word for decades now but never gone past the need to format college papers and such. One would think that a program I paid money for would come equipped with everything I need to convert files like this … and perhaps it does and I just haven’t discovered it yet.
We are now at the end of the week and I have dabbled in just about everything in my search for the right document converter. I’ve kept a running tally.
Calibre: Looked neat but only lets me view the eBook through its system. Might be missing a step here to get it into published form.
Scrivener: Very neat. I love the notecard preview thing it does. Not sure how to take the titles out of my Chapters but I’ve got 27 days left and counting on my free trial to figure it out. (And really, if I like it enough I’ll probably go ahead and purchase a copy.) Also, I was able to email my iPad a copy of the epub book to look through, so that’s progress.
Sigil: … I just barely scratched the surface of this one. I am wary of CSS. I am not a coder and do not wish to break my book in unfathomable ways. I will update later once I’ve gotten my hands a little dirty with this one.
Open Office: … weirdly like my Microsoft Word Document only with a function that lets me see formatting issues in the manuscript. This was necessary for conversion with Calibre but when I went to do the same with Scrivener it royally screwed the pooch. I took up the Microsoft Word mantle again and was able to convert a clean copy of the novel onto Scrivener without issue.
I haven’t tried anything with Kindle files yet. I will tackle that one once I’ve figured out the basics of this conversion process.
In any case, it’s Halloween and I’m taking the night off. No writing. No converting. I shall bake spooky cupcakes with the Spawn, carve pumpkins, build a haunted ginger-bread house, watch Doctor Who and play Star Wars until midnight …
Because at midnight National Novel Writing Month begins and I’m running full-tilt for the 50,000 word line.
AJMaguire 