I Write (Legacy)

The very first time I recall writing anything I think I was seven, although that seems unreasonably old compared to what kids do at seven these days. I have a memory of a classroom, glass windows along the left wall framing the day. A battered desk with a lid. I think I was about seven because until then we’d been in Infants where we sat on the floor or at low desks with no lid.

Not the original

My first writing at the desk with a lid was precluded by a teacher handing out thin books of lined paper and a sharp pencil with a rubber at the end. There was a sharpener too. That’s what I remember. Our first job was to write about ourselves and to say how old we were and when our birthday was, which proved to be a lot harder than we thought because hardly any of us knew when our birthday was. At least to speak out a day, month and year.

Once we got past eleven we were trusted with ink and I remember being given my first BIC pen, although not the context of the classroom or what I was expected to write. Between the age of eleven and sixteen I read a LOT, but I wrote very little. Occasionally during those years I managed to translate some of what went on in my head to the written page. Not often though. Mostly I loved art.

When I was sixteen my baffling fascination with the possibilities afforded by calculator buttons, lead me to my first computer. This was back when nobody knew what computers were. I bought it from Boots and haven’t stopped writing since. At first I wrote computer programs by copying them from magazines. This progressed to writing them from my head. It became my job.

By the time I was twenty-one I was writing programs using SmartWare, which was a office suite with arguably better integration in 1992 than Microsoft Office has in 2012. I also found myself spending a lot of time writing user documentation for the programs I was writing. I have very fond memories of this time.

Windows circa 1994

Windows became pervasive and I worked increasingly with Word in writing my documentation. I disliked Word from the very beginning. It’s far too contrived and still carries many of its flaws twenty years later.

When I was thirty-four I found myself working in the Middle-East and Asia. It was a very emotional time having accepted a job there to escape the collapse of my first marriage. It was a time when I first saw the world outside of one nation’s perspective. I was constantly awash with ideas and thoughts. With some notion of recording these I bought a small red notepad and a pen, because my laptop then wasn't anything you'd ever consider using on your lap. I imagined writing my experiences into that notepad, while on planes between Hong Kong and Singapore, or on the bus back to the Gold Coast. I recently found it and while much of what I wrote brings back vivid memories, it seems I spent more time daydreaming and not so much writing it all down.

After two Boeing 737s flew into two towers in 2001, I found myself briefly in Kuwait and then for a year in Yorkshire. The post-graduates I worked with in Harrogate were very excited about the forthcoming release of the LOTR Special Edition DVD. I got caught up in the excitement. It was the creativity poured into making the films that changed everything for me. It lit something inside of me that has burned bright every day since. At that time I decided to write a book Peter Jackson would make into a movie. I’ve never been short of fanciful ideas.

My first story of Jedi like medieval warriors brought to me the realisation I didn’t have the world knowledge or words to create the kind of stories I wanted to write. I started by studying human history and hunting down god. I also wrote a blog about everything and anything I did in the day to day. I wrote directly into DreamWeaver, which was the web editing software I used to create the blog website.

In 2004 I turned thirty-seven and joined a website called Great Writing. Submitting any kind of writing via the website was traumatic, so I started looking for something I could write in before posting. I discovered OpenOffice, which has a word processor called Writer. This displayed the page on the screen as if it was a sheet of paper. It didn’t try to second guess or do anything that took me away from writing. Writer has been my writing companion ever since.

In 2006 I first heard a character’s voice in my head and created my first cohesive short story narrative. I wrote it in Writer and copied it to both Great Writing and my blog.  By 2007 I had a production line of short stories and the idea for my first novel, which I started in 2008 after six months of daydreaming. I used Writer to create a template and used that to create each new chapter. When Chasing Innocence was finished in 2009 I used Writer to bring all the chapters together and edit the story. In preparing the book for the printers I exported from Writer to Word and away it went.

In 2012 I was forty-five and two decades of using Microsoft products came to a long overdue end when I bought an iPad - well, the iPad was the beginning of the end. It looked like my writing future would be Apple in design. Except, for a lot of  small and different reasons, migrating from a Netbook to a MacBook meant leaving behind my beloved OpenOffice Writer. Such was my determination to switch I changed everything about my day to day writing. It has been like learning to write with my left hand. It also feels like something worth doing. I'll let you know how I get on.

Other posts in the I Write series:
I Write (Interface)
I Write (Finding time)

Going Kindle for less than the price of a tasty sandwich

I am, it has to be said, a huge fan of ebooks. I bought a Sony e-reader two years ago and owned a Kindle the minute they were released in the UK. I now exclusively read Kindle books because of the convenience. In the main the books are also cheaper. That said, having gone to the trouble of writing and actually printing a book, there is something quite satisfying about holding in your hands tangible evidence for all that toil. Especially when the book looks THIS good. The reality is, while electricity is available to power portable devices, the future role of printed books will gradually evolve away from what it is now. The lesson I learned on this debut publishing experience was a printed book takes a lot of time to produce, and almost as long to filter though wholesalers and distributor databases. In future I'll be making the Kindle version available while the printing mechanics clunk through and not afterwards. Compared to printing a book, publishing for a Kindle was almost a breeze.

I did consider using the free e-book management tool - Calibre. It does a damn fine job of making your book Kindle ready and with a little learning you can get very close to a professional finish.  I didn't consider for one minute uploading the HTML or Word book file directly to Amazon and letting them do everything else, as that would have left the book very much in the hands of automation. I could have hired someone to create the Kindle edition, but it's not that difficult if you've ever done a bit of web design. I did it myself so that I'd have total control over layout. My mantra throughout has been to produce a product at least AS GOOD as those available from 'proper' publishers. To this end my baseline for laying out both book versions was Lee Child's - The Affair.

Both digital and printed versions began with my completed draft of the book. Chasing Innocence was written in OpenOffice and then exported to Word for copy and proof editing. Once that was done it was imported to QuarkExpress for typesetting, for the per page layout of the printed book. Then it was exported to a PDF document format and sent to the printers. For the digital versions, QuarkExpress doesn't have a 'save as Kindle' or 'save as epub' option, so the book was exported as Word. And from Word I exported as 'filtered html' - which removes a lot of the Word specific 'junk code' and leaves you with a relatively un-cluttered html file. HTML is a text file, formatted so you can see content in a web browser. It is also the basis for the content of digital books. The Kindle especially wants uncluttered HTML with little formatting. This is because the Kindle expects to handle much of the text layout or digital typesetting itself, including the font style, the font size and line spacing at the readers choice. I decided on three simple paragraph styles. The first forced the Kindle NOT to indent the first line of each chapter or section. If you take a look at the first paragraph of any chapter of any printed book, you will see why. Without this formatting the Kindle will indent the first line of every paragraph. The second style tells the Kindle what size of indent must be applied to all other paragraphs. No other styling was specified because the Kindle supports very little. If you try to get fancy, what looks pretty in a web browser will probably be ignored or worse, confuse the device. The third was for styling chapter headings. I kept this simple too, trying to reproduce the look of the printed book with centred text and each new chapter starting several centimetres down the page, using the top and bottom margin tags. These three styles made the content of the HTML file nice and easy. I also used the top and bottom margin tags to create ad-hoc spacing in the non-chapter pages at the front and back. Then I manually added in page-breaks at every required section, as letting the Kindle decide had some unexpected results.

The Kindle has a menu option, from which you can select 'GoTo...' From here you can select the beginning, the cover, table of contents and the end.  The device works out the end for itself. For the Table of Contents to work you must name each section in the book using standard HTML 'A' tags. As I had ninety-five chapters and several other distinctive sections, I named the sections and used Calibre to generate the table of contents from a copy. I then pasted that into the beginning of my HTML book file. To make sure the Kindle GoTo menu option works the cover needs to have a name tag of: 'cover', the table of contents: 'TOC and the Title Page: 'Start'. Creating the cover itself was a matter of cropping the book's cover to fit the Kindle screen (600 x 800) and linking the image into the HTML file, and giving it that 'cover' name tag. For the Beginning option you make sure the title page is named 'Start' and you're almost good to go.

Apart from the main HTML body of your book and the cover image file, you need two other files for a fully packaged Kindle book. The first is used by the Kindle to navigate backwards and forwards between chapters in the book. Your bundled book won't be accepted by Amazon without one. Once more I used Calbre to create the 'toc.ncx' and then edited it to my needs.

The next file is almost the final stage. The contents file (OPF) is used to compile your book. I used MobiPocket Creator to do this as it was free and recommended by Amazon, editing the contents it generated to match Amazon guidelines for embedding the cover and pointing to the toc.ncx created previously. I then used it to compile the book. Now this is where it gets interesting. You want to check your book looks good on a Kindle right? While you can download the Kindle previewer for your PC/MAC, it doesn't exactly match how your book will look on a Kindle. If you actually own a Kindle you may know it has its own email address which you can find in its settings pages. If you email your compiled book as an attachment to this address, from the email account you log into Amazon with, it will appear on your Kindle. Usually within five-ten minutes.

By doing this and reviewing on the Kindle, I noticed and changed some formatting, and decided it would look more professional with some logos on the title, copyright and final page. So I added these at the correct locations like I did for the cover and after a few revisions we were good to go. A few days later after the final check-through, I logged into Amazon, specified a separate cover image for the Amazon page, linked it to the printed books ISBN and clicked go. As I own worldwide rights I had to specify a price for each region, instead opting to let the books pricing be based on the US dollar value. This works out at £3:49, which was my initial target price. I will of course monitor and amend the price. Amazon then took the file and processed it, allowing me to download the exact file of Chasing Innocence they will send to your Kindle when you ever so kindly buy it. After I tested it was good, I clicked Finished and after a request to prove I was the author, copyright and world wide rights holder, the book suddenly and quite majestically, appeared on Amazon.

Now all you need to do is click on this link to go to the Kindle version of Chasing Innocence, where you will be one more click from seeing what I've been banging on about these last few months, and importantly, you will be mere seconds from being the proud owner of an enthralling, thriller fiction digital novel that cost you less than a tasty sandwich.