[Hitch]

Originally Posted by gmw

I don't think I've seen an author here (that participates in these discussions) that would object. We'd like to get it mostly right first, but you can never get it perfect for everyone which is where tools like Calibre step in.

I'm certain that's true.

As a computer geek by day, "cool" is not a commonly received description.

I do use Calibre for my reading library, not for publishing yet. For publishing, so far, my process has been: the base epub is generated from LibreOffice and then cleaned up and checked using Sigil which lets me manually adjust the CSS and HTML to remove detritus left by the automation and generally ensure consistency. The kindle version is then generated from the epub using Amazon supplied tools.

Good on ya. But you know you're in the minority. And you're certainly cool, gmw.

To be fair, the "Nuclear Method" is really the only hope for removing the crap that comes out of a Word document after months of work.

OK--here, I shall most violently differ with you. The only reason that ANY cruft comes out of a Word file is because the person who typed it never bothered to take 2 hours, and actually learn how to use Word, period. With almost no effort whatsoever, I can create a 100K Word file (obviously, I'm not talking about the BOOK, itself, I'm talking the mechanics here) and have virtually NOTHING to remove, in the HTML. NOTHING.

If someone takes Word, and uses it like a typewriter, then, yes--it will generate cruft. Ad hoc typing will do that in Word. But here's the rub--so does everything ELSE. I don't give two figs if it's INDD, InCopy, Word, Open Office, Libre Office, etc.--they all, all, generate crap if someone doesn't bother to learn how to use them. If someone doesn't learn styles (heading and paragraph styles/css classes), then yes, the "Nuclear Method" might be needed, but that's also only if the person doing it wants to learn ZERO about HTML, regex, or even fundamental, simple, search-replace.

Why someone that presumably wants to be a full-time, professional writer, won't learn his or her primary writing tool--damned if I know. It's positively mystifying. But, hey--while they continue not to learn it, it helps keep my business in the black.

... But there is an Irish phrase I've heard that comes to mind, "You shouldn't be starting from here if you want to get there." (Or something like that.) Starting the automatic generation process from a Word document is about as far from ideal as I can imagine.

To this DAY, conversion from Word is STILL the fastest, cheapest, and easiest method to make an eBook. You may disagree, based upon your own personal method, but we've had over 3K books come through my shop, and I've seen HTML that would make The Rock cry--most of it generated by people who read a blog somewhere and decided to "fix" their own Word-based HTML, because they believed the constant Gates-hate battle drum of "Word makes HORRIBLE HTML! RUN, RUN, you fools!"

(And, yes, of course, we've looked at OO/LO, and the cruft that's output from there is every bit as crappy as Word. Pages? OMG, far WORSE than Word. INDD? Ditto. We convert from all of these pretty much every day of the week--and our rates for Word are still roughly half of everything else's rates. Why? Repeat after me: Word's so-called "cruft" just isn't that hard to clean up. If you know anything at all about Word, or HTML, or both, you can do it pretty damned quickly. Even if you do NOT, you can freely download Toxaris' wonderful ePUBTools program, and clean up your Word file in a few minutes, and output nearly perfectly clean HTML. It ain't that hard, kiddies.)

I've used the Smashwords "meatgrinder" to publish my short stories, but not my novels - it seemed such a waste to have gone to such lengths to create a clean epub, only to have to go back to a dirty document and let their automation loose on it.

It's the Calibre API--period. There's nothing magical about SW's "meatgrinder." If you've made your ePUB with Calibre, there's an excellent chance that you won't see a thing different with the output book.

The problem being that Smashwords won't even offer a preview of a book that you publish only via epub, which puts it at something of a disadvantage (telling people to read the preview on Amazon doesn't really cut it).

Sorry? This section confused me. You can publish a MOBI there, as well as their other formats--?? And what's the LITB on Amazon got to do with it?

I think you're supposed to do both (clean epub and meatgrinder version), but so far I haven't bothered except for the shorts.

AND, this confuses me, too. Why wouldn't you just load your ePUB there? There isn't going to be any difference, (see above), and the ePUB intake is a slightly different process than the Word file-->.

Which would worry me more if I was trying to make a living at this - I'd like to, but that's not going to happen until I write more, learn more, publish more and get serious about marketing (the last part scares the --- out of me).

Indeed. That seems to be the largest challenge, facing our clients. Of course, we see a goodly number of books that escaped, too, rather than being released. I guess I'd say, marketing AND editing, are two of the biggest challenges that I see, surrounding self-publishing.

But mostly it all comes back to: those that do care about the craft are already trying to do the right thing, those that don't won't be listening anyway.

Yes, that's abundantly obvious. I see the former in my biz all the time, and unfortunately, the latter out and about on the various and sundry forums--the classics, the ones who put up a book and then 3 months or 6 months later, post to ask "why isn't my book selling?," and when you view it, it's indecipherable, or has OBVIOUSLY never seen a red pencil, or even been proofed.

OT:

Spoiler:

In my humble opinion, the sad demise of writer's groups and critique groups has had an extremely deleterious effect on the "published book" today. Most of what I see, on the KDP, et al, forums, wouldn't even be good enough to submit to a critique group, much less bloody publish. When I was still in a critique group, lo these many years ago, if someone had submitted some of what I've seen, which is patently what SHOULD be a "shotty first draft," rather than even a proofed version, I'd have rejected it from critique. Now, if that's the case, why the frack is the damn thing published?

Anyway--while I agree with most of what you said, the whole "Word produces cruft thing" is like... an urban myth. It's right up there with Alligators living in the sewers, or Candyman coming out of the mirror to get you. Or whatever that is. Can Word output crap? Oh, yes. But why? Because that's what the typist PUT IN. Authors, writers, typists everywhere: take a whopping 1-2 hours of your lives and take a few small tutorials from the MS website, or YouTube. Learning Word's built-in Styles and Headings won't just give you control of the output HTML--it will save you MANY hours of labor, in creating ANY document, and will enable you to use most of Word's most glorious features, 99% of which the typical user has never seen, simply because they do NOT UNDERSTAND the built-in STYLES AND HEADINGS.

It's utterly mind-blowing that people don't learn it. It really is.

/End of my mystified rant.

Hitch