Well, Kindle, Ha

So, my concern was the cover, but that looks fine. It’s the whole “Not available” part that’s troubling. Ha ha ha.

Anyway, maybe by the time you read this, it’ll be for sale?

Second Only to Delighting a Member of the Goth Community

My secret hope is that the Nashville Goth community will come to love my book. That will delight the hell out of me. But what happened tonight was almost as good.

The Redheaded Kid came over and he was all “What have you  been up to?”

And I said, “I wrote a book.”

“For real?”

“Yes, you should totally read it.”

I hand him a copy.

“Oh my god! Is this a real thing? I love ghost stories! I’m going to read the shit out of this.”

I’m a little sad I can’t somehow use “I’m going to read the shit out of this” in my promotional material.

I Could Get Used to This

Folks taking pictures of the book when they get it. I’m having a little bit of cognitive dissonance realizing that the books are actually going to be in people who purchased them’s hands today and tomorrow. People can read it this weekend!

OOOh.

That’s pretty wild.

I hope y’all like it. I hope it creeps the shit out of you and makes you laugh.

I’m ready to see if people like it.

Let’s Discuss Kindle and I Will Refrain from Kicking Folks

This is not a dig at anyone here. You didn’t know. Hell, I didn’t know.

But, in the future, if you wish to discuss whether a Kindle version of someone’s book exists, believe me this is the only way that conversation should go:

“Oh, hurray! You have a book! Is there going to be a Kindle edition?”

“Um… well… yeah… I…”

“Say no more. I happen to have three dozen rotten eggs and a full tank of gas. If you can find out who at Amazon needs their house egged, we are going.”

That’s it. Don’t say how much you’d love a Kindle edition. Don’t say anything about how you only buy Kindle books. Don’t say how you pressed the “Tell the publisher you want a Kindle edition” link at Amazon, because, let me tell you, that’s like pressing the “Close” button in an elevator. It’s just there to make you feel better. Nothing happens when you press it.

I had Samantha’s infinite help with getting a Kindle-friendly electronic version of the book ready and I still, seriously, would love to go and beat someone about it. They make it seem like, oh, if you just have a PDF, you can just upload that and they’ll work their magic and a nice looking ebook comes out. No.

Then, there’s some insinuation that, if you just upload an ePUB file, they’ll work their magic and a nice looking ebook comes out. We didn’t even bother to try that.

Samantha somehow made a MOBI file, which finally, uploaded and appears to look nice.

And then there’s the book jacket, which you may recall, Amazon already has. But no, you have to upload another cover, specifically for Kindle. Fine, right? How hard can that be?

It is the equivalent of being asked to answer “What is 2 +2? If you are correct, you should see a smiley face on the screen.” So, you type in “4” and you get a frowny face. You type in “four” and you get a frowny face. You type in motherfucking IV and you get a frowny face, though this time in a slightly different color.

Now, you’re sending Samantha incoherent emails sent by an angry rabid badger having a breakdown in which she loses basic language skills. “Me know word. Words mean words meaning. Why me no get words and pictures to work? Hate, hate, hate.” You’re like the motherfucking Hulk of people who sit on the couch a lot.

You’re sending screenshots to Samantha like its her birthday. A very crappy birthday in which her friends send her screenshots of shit not working, but a birthday none the less.

And finally, she rigs a cover image that at least stays rectangular and is the right color. It looks fine on your screen, fuzzy on Amazon’s screen, but you are like “Fuck you Amazon, fuck you right in the nostril.” so you upload it.

As if you were somehow supposed to guess that the answer to 2+2= was 17-13.

And if you have a Nook, I’m sorry to tell you but you are just shit out of luck, because they don’t even have their program for independent publishers up and running. Samantha thinks there may be a way to get it uploaded to iBooks, but I’m going to need a minute to calm down before I can contemplate that.

This is the thing I don’t get. Amazon needs content for the Kindle. Why on earth would they make it so difficult for publishers to get them that content? At the least someone needs to rewrite their content guidelines.

Okay, that’s the end of my rant.

I feel better now.

It’s probably unwise to complain about Kindle before the book is no longer “in progress” but there’s some crap there that really needs to be fixed.