Urban fiction: The Living Fire by Ronald Lee

[MagoriaBooks]

Hello, MobileRead Members!

I am the publisher of the book "The Living Fire". I have started taking some steps toward releasing this title in (multiple) eBook formats.

In order to gauge interest, I made available the first 3 chapters (30-60 pages, depending on the page size) on Feedboks:

The Living Fire (Reader's Preview)
Ronald Lee's autobiographical novel, formerly published as "Goddam Gypsy", is an intense, fast moving, and brutally honest affair. Yanko--a Canadian Rom who 'took the non-Romani way but didn't go far'--seeks his fortunes both among and apart from the Roma, never quite finding his place. His story exposes the out of sight, out of mind world of Canada's Roma in 1970's Montreal: Parties, rackets, bar brawls, weddings, desperate poverty, and intermittent police raids fuel in Yanko the passion, creativity, and rebellious defiance that is The Living Fire.

I would be grateful if some people gave it a shot and wrote some feedback about whether or not they see themselves buying the full eBook, when it becomes available.

Thanks a lot!

Roland from Magoria Books

[MagoriaBooks]

Hello again, folks.

The preview is really supposed to have 2 illustrations (full page scanned images of authentic hand-drawn tarot cards) that are accompanied by some text (about a page for each of the 2 pictures). This didn't make it into the Feedbooks preview, because I couldn't figure out how to add images.

If I were to upload a cleanly formatted RTF with the pictures and all, is there anybody on here that would be willing to convert it to the various popular eBook formats? As noted in the preview, non-profit distribution is encouraged, so people would be more than free to put it up anywhere else they feel to. (In fact, I'd be thrilled if someone did.)

Roland from Magoria Books

[koland]

Just publish it on Smashwords and set the price to free - one upload gets you all the formats.

[MagoriaBooks]

Originally Posted by koland

Just publish it on Smashwords and set the price to free - one upload gets you all the formats.

I've already tried that, Koland. Unfortunately despite following the style guide, the conversion process produced inconsistent output. Do you think (assuming the hick-up can be resolved somehow) their automatic conversion would manage the illustrations alright? Would it not require manual adjustment?

Roland from Magoria Books

[koland]

Originally Posted by MagoriaBooks

I've already tried that, Koland. Unfortunately despite following the style guide, the conversion process produced inconsistent output. Do you think (assuming the hick-up can be resolved somehow) their automatic conversion would manage the illustrations alright? Would it not require manual adjustment?

I suspect most of those who have managed to get the illustrations correct have tweaked the HTML a bit.

One of the most successful methods seems to be:

Save your doc as TXT (or cut/paste into notepad).

Start a brand new doc (this dumps all old coding out of the word doc) and paste in the book from the TXT file. Add minimal styles to accomplish your formatting (indent first line of paragraph, but only a tiny amount, add style for chapter headings, generate your TOC). Add in your images, let them flow with the text (don't try placing on pages). Save to HTML.

From the HTML, do any further formatting you might need. When I create mobi by hand, I go thru and dump all the font change info (other than bold/italic), double check the labels, add the html code for new page before chapter changes (and I let mobicreator add the table of contents and cover page, as well as set the metadata, so none of that is in the HTML file).

Depending on your images, you may need to consider resizing them before adding to your document.

Also, since they are (presumably) insets into the original page format and not part of the book (since there is quite a bit of text with each), I'd probably consider using the illustrations in the original locations, but moving all the accompanying text into an end note (which Kindle handles well, even if it would not be there in a Kindle sample). That solves the problem of the text just being jumbled up into the middle of the story.