Reseller inconsistencies

[gmw]

So, my book is starting to appear in places. And the first thing to strike me how inconsistent these places are.

Amazon seems to have gotten it right. I gave BookBaby three paragraphs of "long description". Amazon are happily showing the long description as three paragraphs. And it all happened very quickly (2 days from submission to showing up).

Kobo and eBookPie are the other places showing it so far, and that's still quicker than I'd expected, but they've both taken the long description and flowed it all into one paragraph. (If it had have been dialogue I might have been really screwed.) eBookPie have even managed to screw up the two hyphens in the text - I hate to think what they might have done with any accented characters.

So what's the deal here, do you think? Is this something I need to discuss with BookBaby, or do you get the same problem submitting from Smashwords?

[VydorScope]

Originally Posted by gmw

So what's the deal here, do you think? Is this something I need to discuss with BookBaby, or do you get the same problem submitting from Smashwords?

Yes, and Yes.

As in Yes, listings get messed up when I go through Smashwords, and Yes you have to talk to BookBaby about fixing them as THEY own the listing not you. It is annoying, but that is how the system currently works.

[MartinC]

Originally Posted by gmw

Kobo and eBookPie are the other places showing it so far, and that's still quicker than I'd expected, but they've both taken the long description and flowed it all into one paragraph.

I had a similar problem with Kobo that I was never able to resolve. I think they use the description given in the book's metadata, rather than the one supplied separately.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by MartinC

I had a similar problem with Kobo that I was never able to resolve. I think they use the description given in the book's metadata, rather than the one supplied separately.

Nah, this one I can tell because I had similar difficulties trying to attach a description to the metadata (even started a thread on the Sigil sub-forum about it*) but eventually I gave up and wrote a special single paragraph description just for the metadata. So I can tell that Kobo got their description from BookBaby, not from the EPub, and I know BookBaby didn't screw up the paragraphs because Amazon got them right.

BookBaby got back to me and said they will put in a request to have the descriptions fixed, but it may take up to three weeks.

ETA: And I see that Copia now have the book up, and they're only showing the first of the three paragraphs (with no obvious "show more" or anything, and again not the metadata version). Sheesh, do these people even test their processes?

* There seems to be no standard/accepted way of providing structure to book descriptions in EPUB metadata, apparently some people have had some success in editing the epub directly (not through Sigil or whatever) and encoding basic html like <p>...</p> etc (as &xxx; etc.). But you are not guaranteed to have it interpreted correctly because, as far as I can find out, no one actually knows what correctly is.