Mortal Touch has been Kindled!

I’d been reading about Amazon’s new “wireless reading device,” “Kindle” for about a week now. I actually hadn’t realized that it was already on the market. I thought it sounded interesting for a lot of reasons. But last night, quite late, I happened to look at Amazon’s main page, started reading about the Kindle, and saw that it’s already sold out. And, so far, even though Amazon’s catalog includes more than 3,000,000 titles, there are only 91,383 book titles available for the Kindle.

All those people buying this cool new device for Christmas and only 3% of Amazon’s titles are available for them to put on it. Now that’s what I call getting in on the ground floor.

So, I’ve been getting Mortal Touch kindled. This proved more complicated than you might have thought…or maybe just as complicated as you might have thought, after all, this is Amazon.com we’re talking about. *snark* Let’s leave out the part that at midnight last night, when I was in the middle of trying to figure all the Kindle parameters out, I got a totally unexpected phone call from an ex-girlfriend who I haven’t seen in four years who had just gotten here from the west coast and I was on the phone an hour with her and then spent most of today with her catching up and resolving some old Stuff, shall we? Thank you… Before and after said intervention of Real Life(tm), here’s what uploading involved:

• Amazon “converts” your book file for Kindle, and ideally, they want an html file. I think by this time there are two formats that Mortal Touch is not yet in, smoke signals and html. Kindle will “convert” a PDF file to html, but not perfectly. I uploaded the PDF and I didn’t like the results. In that case, Amazon allows you to download the “converted” html file and edit it manually.
• I downloaded the html file, which of course is humungous. Notepad would edit it, but would not do Replace All on the whole file (I tried, and Notepad went into irreversible catatonia). That meant I had to go through replacing things like end-of-line tags and whatnot by hand. This was, um, time-consuming. To say the least.
• I needed to insert the en-space character entity to indent the paragraphs. I couldn’t remember what it was. I looked at the source code for about 10 websites before I found it, because everyone is using style sheets now. (Kindle uses very basic html.)
• After I’d done about seven chapters, the dormant 99% of my brain cells woke up and I realized I could copy-and-paste a chapter at a time into another Notepad file, use Replace All on that chapter, then copy-and-paste it back into the main file. Duh.
• Along with hand-editing the html file (for a 372-page, 170,000-word book), I needed to input account information with bank routing numbers, required for the digital platform agreement. For some reason, I had to do that about four times before it finally accepted all the information and completed the Save.
• I couldn’t get the edited file to upload, and I finally realized, by going back and reading the directions and actually paying attention this time, that I needed to re-save the edited file into a .zip file, the way I’d downloaded it. At first I wasn’t sure my freebie zip software would add files to an archive as well as extract them, but I found that it would. I tried a third time to upload the edited file, zipped, and this time it uploaded. I also uploaded a cover image.
• I “previewed” the uploaded file and it looks fine. Yay! So, I clicked the “Publish” button. I read over the Digital Platform Publish Agreement legalese, determined that there was nothing in there to give me pause, and clicked the “agree and publish” button at the end. Error message–“sorry, we fucked up, try again later.” (or something to that effect, *heh*) The last time I got that message, it was because of the wrong file format, so I double-checked all my account information, and had to re-enter it a couple of times.
• I tried again to “Publish”–and it worked. Or so it says. Apparently, it will take 12 to 72 hours to completely register in the system and become available for sale. But, assuming there are no further glitches, Mortal Touch will be available for everyone to read on their shiny new Kindles! I priced it at $9.99, because I looked at the best selling Kindle titles so far and that is overwhelmingly the most common price. I make 35% of that per sale.

Some people in the publishing world are fussing about the effect this will have on book publishing and so on. Not me. I want my books read. I don’t care how people read them. If Kindle is the future of reading, I’m going to be right there at the door with the bowl of candy. If it’s not…I’m still publishing books, and I haven’t risked a dime on this experiment. We shall see!