Been spending another horrific day trying to format a novel for Kindle. This time, "Conspiracy of Angels" for upload onto the Amazon Kindle site. I HATE WORD! Every time I use it I hate it more -- it is so ludicrously complex that there are far too many formatting options for the purpose of converting to .mobi format, as required for the Kindle. They don't tell you which formats are OK for uploading, and which will simply be ignored or overriden. You just have to do the whole job over and again, eliminating one glitsch after another by trial and error. And possibly the most irritating WORD habit of all is that the wretched thing assumes to know better than you do what you actually want to do, so even if you try to modify formats it keeps on flipping back to the original ones all the time, eliminating in an instant maybe a couple of hours of hard work.
And the Pages route doesn't work either, although you are supposed to be able to save a long Pages document in ePub or HTML format, which in theory is acceptable for a .mobi upload. But it just causes chaos -- and when you look at the final .mobi version you see that most of your formatting categories are all screwed up, so that you have to start again in Word anyway.
So beware, if you want to use several different categories of headings and some text in bold, italic or other formats.............
Strange that Amazon, which prides itself on the simplicity and sophistication of its interfaces etc, still uses something straight out of the Stone Age..... maybe they don't want it to be TOO easy, and use it as a deterrent so that only the most determined people actually succeed in getting their masterpieces uploaded onto the Kindle site.........
Anyway, thank goodness that all 8 novels are now uploaded. May be a couple of days before they are available for purchase.
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