Yesterday, I finally published Comic-Con Heroes: The Fans Who Make the Greatest Show on Earth to the Kindle Store. For San Diego Comic-Con 2013, I interviewed attendees and chose a dozen to profile. Their stories say much about the roles we play and who are the Con’s real superheroes.
I wrote the full-text using Google Docs on Chromebook Pixel, which combined is the best writing platform I have ever used.
I paginated the text using Microsoft Word 2011 on a five year-old aluminum MacBook—a totally miserable experience. Amazon strongly recommends using Word, which isn’t designed for ebook publishing.
I spent days sorting out how to do the photos correctly, for example. The last problem proved the most mystifying: All the photos looked crappy in the converted ebook. Turns out that Word for Mac downsizes photos, converting them to gifs, when saving a document to HTML. I had to replace the gifs with original jpegs and edit the code to get things right.
I won’t do that again. My next tome will skip Word, an app I otherwise wouldn’t use anyway, and go a more direct route from HTML to Amazon .mobi file format.
I’d love your $4.99, but if you wait until Monday, Comic-Con Heroes will be available for free as a 24-hour promotion to generate interest and reviews. Or if you’re a primary Amazon Prime member, you can borrow the book for free right now.