Tag Archive for: epub

Digital Publishing

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By Bethany Maines
Recently, I’ve been learning about the nitty gritty “how-to”
of e-publishing.  While there are many
how-to’s on how to put your story up for sale in the virtual marketplace,
learning how to make an epub file is a lot more difficult and confusing. 
As someone trained in how to make print books, this status
is infuriating to me.  I can make words
magically appear on paper – why is the screen any more difficult?  But as it turns out epub formatting is more
akin to website programming than to traditional book design.  Both epub and websites must account for the
fact that the designer can never be certain on what or how the end user will view
their product.  Will it be on a phone, a
tablet, or a desktop screen?  Will it be
a horizontal or vertical?  Which
operating system will be accessing the file? 
All of these factors play into how an e-book is seen and creating a file
that can be used in ANY format means that many of the traditional design
elements beloved by graphic designers, such as color, size, and forced white
space, must be set aside. Learning to create an epub is a bit like feeding
content into a slot in the wall, letting the machine in the next room whir away,
and then trying to guess how the machine works by looking at the book it
produces.
In the last few years website programming has experienced a
burst of development that can make creating a website an almost drag and drop, WYSISWYG
experience.  Meanwhile, digital publishing
lags behind, still in it’s infancy. 
Take a look at these images of the first page of my third
Carrie Mae Mystery novel, High-Caliber Concealer.  One is a screen cap from a mobile phone
kindle app and the other is a photo of the printed book.

You’ll notice several differences – the large area of white
space before the chapter title is gone and the fonts are not the same.  Fonts in epub’s must utilize a websafe font
or embed the font within the file.  But,
not all devices recognize embedded fonts, and they make a file larger and some
platforms take a percentage out of an author’s royalty based on download size
(you’re hogging space on their server).

However, there are some similarities that the programmer
managed to achieve.  Notice how the gap
between “Brunch” and “Mexico” mimics the print version?  And you’ll see that while the font isn’t the
same, the font hierarchy and general sizing of the chapter information is the
same as the print version. 
And beyond the appearance of words on a screen there is the
tricky business of making all the chapters appear in the right order and having
a hyper-linked (click and go) table of contents that allow readers to navigate
easily through the book. 

No digital book is as simple as a word doc you type at
home.  So if you see a well-crafted book
on your e-reading device, take a moment to appreciate the book programmer!  
***
Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie
Mae Mysteries, Tales from the City of
Destiny and An Unseen Current.
 You can also view the Carrie Mae youtube video
or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.

So a Man Walks Into a Bar…

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Or
Look, it’s My New Short Story!
by
Bethany Maines

I have a theory that short stories are like jokes.  There’s the set-up that establishes
location and characters. A man walks into a bar with a duck on his head.  Then
there’s the action that moves the plot forward. The bartender says,
“Sorry, we don’t serve monkey’s in here.” And the man says, “It’s a duck.”  And
then there’s the ending. The bartender says, “I was talking to the
duck.”  There’s always more that can be added to the joke, such as
why the man had a duck on his head to begin with or who won the fight after the
ending, but the joke doesn’t really need it.  And there’s the challenge to the author – to figure out what
is the right amount of information and what is just an explanation of the why
the man is wearing a duck hat.
Tomorrow, I’ll be releasing my first e-short story,
Supporting the Girls, (available from Amazon, ibook, Barnes & Noble, and Vook) so you will be able to judge for yourselves whether or
not I selected the correct information. Supporting the Girls is a new adventure for Nikki Lanier and her covert
team of Carrie Mae make-up ladies. 
(If you haven’t read my novels Bulletproof Mascara and Compact With the Devil, you may need to understand that Carrie Mae is a
make-up corporation, specializing in at-home sales and make-up parties, that
also happens to run an organization of female operatives that help women
everywhere.)

And I may have gotten a little carried away while I was working
on my story because I also made a video. 
But when you have a “great idea for a movie” (you have to say that part
like Jean Claude VanDamme), you know a videographer, and you’re friends with an
entire karate school of awesome people, suddenly an action movie doesn’t sound
like such a far-fetched venture.  Head over to youtube to check it out!
It’s possible of course that my joke isn’t that good, or
that possibly the joke is on me, but tomorrow you will have the opportunity to
judge for yourselves and I’m hoping I hear laughter.  But… um… you did read that part about how I’m friend with an
entire karate school, right?  Let’s
just say, I’d better hear laughter. 
Leave a comment to below for a chance to win a free copy of Supportingthe Girls!