[Alnoteman]

Hi all, though my user name is Alnoteman my nick name is Notty so I'll sign off as Notty. I'm 73 so getting a bit old for all this tech stuff but I'm trying to keep up with modern trends. I was born in Manchester UK and spent 27 years there. Then went out to South Africa for a better life and spent 27-years there as well, ending up with three kids and a boat. Built the yacht Jacana while working there and set sail in 1995 on a 16000-mile cruise with my wife and son. Having done two South Atlantic crossings before this I guess I must have sailed 26000-miles in all. We visited Brazil, French Guiana & Devils Island, the Caribbean from Grenada in the South through the Grenadenes through the Windward and Leeward Islands to St. Maarten. Chased out of there by Hurrican Luis so sailed over the N. Atlantic to Azores, the UK and Med. Arrived back in the UK by boat to visit friends and got stuck here where we ran out of money.

I started again by working in various shipyards in Spain and the UK installing Fire Detection Systems on RN warships & Ferries as a sub contractor to Tyco. I did this till age 68 when they told me to bugger off you're too old for this work! I've been semi retired ever since.

I've joined this forum as I'm sure a lot of you may have done out of sheer frustration with the huge job that is seems to be of getting a book published as an ebook. Had I known how much was involved when I started I probably would have had it done by a pro. However, having spent weeks and weeks trying to master it all, I'm now on the last leg, the dreaded TOC! I'm not sure if I can contribute much as I'm sure most of you are far more advanced than I am but for what it's worth here goes a little of what I've found so far?

The writing was the easy bit, even the editing was not a huge problem but once I decided to try to make a mobi file that's where the problems started. I spent a lot of time trying to strip formatting from Word and in the end I gave up on MS-word 97, MS-Word 2000 and even MS-Word 2011 for Mac. as I found them all to be unstable when it came to images, page breaks, line breaks and blank pages appearing from nowhere. I then purchased Serif desktop publishing package and found that OK but the Epub files that it generated were not accepted by Mobipocket. After many tries I decided that the only way was to convert to a PDF file then feed this through Mobipocket and this worked. I managed to get this accepted by Amazon and now only need the TOC. This is where I'm stuck as I have no knowledge of html. I am willing to learn from others and that is my main reason for joining the forum so hope you don't think that's a selfish reason.

Cheers, Notty. (Alnoteman)