Two Items

There are two rather technical subjects I want to cover this month. First is formatting poetry in epubs, and second is my latest failure.

Poetry in epubs is tricky. I will refer you to Derek Haines’s article on the subject. My experience shadowed his advice. I was not trying to create poetry with KDP, which Derek covers, but with Draft2Digital, which he also talks about.

The central problem is that, appropriately, epubs expect the text of a paragraph to “flow.” Depending on what font size and style a reader is using, it will vary the length of a line on the device (laptop, table, or phone). The words in the paragraph need to flow to adjust to the physical space available to it.

Poetry is a fixed format, not a paragraph. It has lines and stanzas. In a Word document, if you turn on the hidden formatting symbols (in Home, hit the ¶ symbol), you will see that each line of the poem you have written ends with the end of paragraph symbol (¶). Draft2Digital disregards half of Word’s formatting and does what it wants. Each line of your poem is a paragraph? D2D puts spacing between each paragraph. It will stretch your poem out down the page and ignore the stanza breaks. Try it. It looks awful.

However, you don’t have to upload a Word document to D2D; you can upload your own epub created with Calibre, a free ebook converter. (Learning curve warming!) Calibre respects the Word formatting and is not all that hard to figure out. There is an extensive manual, which you can get to by hitting the Help icon. The point being you end up with an epub that looks like your Word document.

To some extent, the flow problem still exists. If the poem line is longer than the device and font size allow, it will still flow to a second line. If you have indented your poem, then the second line goes to the margin as a paragraph line would. You may want to consider not indenting the poem to alleviate the line’s appearance of staggering.

On to the next item. Last month, I mentioned the idea of using my free reader magnet, Stories and Poems of Trueterra, on promotional sites to get email addresses from interested readers. I immediately ran into a catch-22. All of the promotional sites assume you are promoting a book by lowering the list price temporarily. They also assume you have an ASIN number assigned by Amazon. Most require an ASIN number for you to list the book with them. Is Amazon now the only game in town?

KDP does not usually publish perma-free books, which is how I got involved with D2D, which will publish them. However, that means my book does not have an ASIN number. So that little project went belly-up.

By-the-by, Stories and Poems of Trueterra does not have an ISBN number either. Ebooks are not required to have one; print books are if they are to be sold. In my case, since the content of each edition of the work has changed—I have added a poem or story—I would need a new ISBN number every time, an expense I do not wish to incur.

Next month, I will talk about my latest endeavor, creating a fantasy map for Sword of Trueterra.