I decided I wanted to put my books up on All Romance Ebooks. So I downloaded calibre so I could convert to as many formats as possible. It looked like everything was going great, but when I opened up the epub file, all my apostrophes were black rectangles. Not to mention, the first page was my cover and it was all stretched out (that might just be a viewing problem…will have to look into it further). The mobi format did the same thing with my apostrophes and it lost my page breaks. The pdb format changed my double quotes to rectangles and my apostrophes to question marks. All the formats lost my chapter heading centering. Ditto with the RB format.
This is one more reason why it’s so hard and frustrating to have a full time job and try to write. I tried to do all of this during my lunch hour, and that’s just not enough time to figure out all the problems. At this point, I’m almost tempted to forget about All Romance. But, on the other hand, an author should try to get her/his books in as many venues as possible. I thought calibre was the answer to book formatting. The easiest route would be to download the different formats of my books from Smashwords. But that’s against their terms of service, and I don’t blame them for that. They spent lots of money to get our books in all those formats. And my conscience won’t let me violate those terms that I agreed to.
So I have seven books to try to convert to several different formats, and I just don’t know when I’ll have time to do it. Not to mention, where will I find time to figure out why they aren’t converting properly? I don’t usually let things get to me. I’m a very laid back, calm person who rolls with the punches. But I feel like I’ve been punched too hard this time.
Amen, sistah! I wasn’t pleased with the formatting either. I like Calibre, but when I load in a file with specific page breaks and the like, I expect it to stay as I formatted it. grrrrr
I’m the most frustrated with the apostrophes and quotes. I don’t know how to fix that. Grrrrrr! I’m not going to go back into the books and change them all. I couldn’t do that anyway except with epub, because Sigil is the only program I have to edit ebooks, and I think it only does epub.
I found the process totally frustrating and my e-pub versions are all screwed up. Don’t feel like you have to rush to do it, I’m not worrying about it because I’ve sold a total of two books and all of my other formats are good. Sorry e-pub people.
Hey Stacey. I just can’t understand why the apostrophes and quotes are messed up. Does this program not recognize two punctuation marks that are common in literature? Or did I do something totally wrong? Did I convert FROM the wrong file? It wouldn’t let me convert from the doc file, so I converted from the pdf (which looks great, by the way). Should I have converted from the html? Maybe I should go back and try that.
So sorry you’re frustrated. I hope you get it figured out soon.
It’s that total lack of time to figure stuff out that frustrates me the most.
Me, too. I sure know what it’s like when you’re trying to do yet another thing to help get your book out there, only to find it ain’t as easy as you thought it would be. That really sucks! I love to write books, (I’ve got four out so far, one of them a romance) but I can barely stand the marketing aspect at times like these. I wish you much luck and way less frustration.
Hi Julie. The bad thing is that I really like technical stuff, but I don’t have time to figure everything out. And I really expected the program to work like I thought it would. I’m going to try to do something a little different to see if it works. I’m not really one to give up too soon. 🙂