So, we (meaning mainly me) are working on getting some of the wife’s books put out there for readers to consume. The books are written, covers designed, formatted, ISBNs and barcodes purchased. Oddly enough, The United States is the only country that makes authors pay for ISBNs. From what I understand, every other country in the world gives them away for free! Sometimes capitalism works against you.
Anyway, we’ve got everything ready for releasing the ebooks. I figure I’ll start with the eight-hundred pound gorilla of the publishing arena, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
I get all the information about the first book typed in, then finally got to the stage where I uploaded the manuscript and the cover. There doesn’t seem to be any problems with the technical parts of the files. Then Amazon ran a utility to determine if there were any misspelled words in the manuscript. I wait a minute or so as the file is processed. It comes back with eighty-seven (87) potential misspellings.
Ruh roh, Shraggy!
I take a look at the list of errors. There are a few legitimately misspelled words. The majority, however, aren’t exactly spelled wrong. They are punctuated wrong.
The wife, being Old School, used the formatting we were taught way back in high school where if you get to the end of the line and the word is too long, you put a hyphen and then continue the word on the next line. Because way back then, just after dirt was invented, you didn’t have digital screens that automatically wrapped everything. Reports and books and newspapers and things were printed on paper. Paper, notoriously, does not have an automatic line wrapping function. It’s a wonder we ever advanced as far as we did. The type doesn’t move on he printed page, so we had these odd punctuation rules.
I opened the original source file for the ebook in an editor and looked for the words with hyphens in them. I corrected the ones that Amazon found. Then I decided to do some more looking. There were plenty of them that were properly used but there were also the ones that had been at the end of a line in the print version that didn’t need to be there. Way more than the 87 Amazon found. I corrected all of them, as well as the other misspelled words. I saved the file and breathed a sigh of relief.
I took my shiny new ebook file and uploaded it to Amazon again. Still no technical problems (Whew!). It ran the utility to look for words incorrectly spelled. I crossed my fingers. It came back with the results.
Twelve misspelled words. Some of them were in French (the wife uses a few French phrases in one of her stories) but there were five that need to be corrected.
I’ll tackle those in the morning.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum