Blessed by the Potato

The book is now live on Amazon. It’ll be a while longer before I can get it into the Kobo online store. Once it’s live in both I’ll do a more thorough promotional post.

I have to say, after putting so much work into formatting the book in what is, IMHO, a very professional manner, the ebook formatting capabilities were very lacking. There was no footnote option, so all footnotes are now endnotes. I had at the end of several chapters a collection of key points in little “call-out boxes” with bulleted lists highlighting the take-home message. While those lists are still there, the boxes are not, so they don’t stand out as much. Even the straightforward tables didn’t translate well, so I had to insert them as images (with an accompanying loss in visual quality). In all cases, limitations are as far as I could determine, so there is a possibility that I might yet figure out how to format the book the way it was meant to be. Suddenly I have a lot more sympathy for software developers that release a beta product and patch it later (one upside to ebooks)!

Edit: It looks like Kobo strongly prefers to only do self-publishing with authors that have ~10+ titles, and they’re suggesting I go with a consolidator/publisher. All of the ones they recommended are American (the book is for Canadians, which is part of why I wanted to focus on Kobo). I’ll have to take some time to read through their offerings and costs to see if any of them will work — I can see right away some of them want to take a step back (after working so hard to create the epub and get an ISBN myself, some of them want to start from the Word doc stage). Most offer to push the book to a number of retailers, including Amazon (which I already covered myself).

So for now, until I find some time to figure Kobo out, if you want the book you can either buy it from Amazon in Kindle format, or send me an email and I can set it up so you can pay me by PayPal ($5 Canadian) and I’ll send you a DRM-free PDF and ePub formatted file by email (good for your Kobo reader or any number of other non-Kindle devices, including your PC).