Taking Advantage of ALL formats

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by queentess

Re: turning blog posts into an ebook... why? What's the purpose, who is the market?

Amazon sells subscriptions to blogs, including Konrath's, I assume that you would get automatic content sent to your Kindle in mobi format when they are updated. They don't cost much, so I suppose for something that is updated daily it would be worth paying so that you don't have to convert them yourself. A bit like paying someone to clean your windows for you.

[Worldwalker]

And then there are those of us who are total slackers with uncleaned windows.

All jokes about the state of my windows (dismal) aside, that's something you have to take into consideration when you're setting up a business. You might have the best window-cleaning service imaginable, but you have to give people a very good reason to pay you for something they could either do themselves or leave undone. Nobody has ever managed to do that for me with window cleaning. It all comes back to every user's question: "What's in it for me?"

[LCF]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I believe you're speaking of the way I can choose "PDF" as my printer when I go to print, for example, an online receipt and instead of physically printing the receipt, it generates a PDF file on my hard drive with whatever title I choose to give it. Is my understanding correct?

Perfectly.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by LCF

Perfectly.

Thanks!

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

And then there are those of us who are total slackers with uncleaned windows.

All jokes about the state of my windows (dismal) aside, that's something you have to take into consideration when you're setting up a business. You might have the best window-cleaning service imaginable, but you have to give people a very good reason to pay you for something they could either do themselves or leave undone. Nobody has ever managed to do that for me with window cleaning. It all comes back to every user's question: "What's in it for me?"

More free time and clean/dry hands. There's lots of things I pay for that I could do myself. If the price is lower than I value my time at, it's worthwhile even if I then end up wasting that time watching cat videos on Youtube.

[JSWolf]

The website is too busy. People will tend to just leave instead of bothering to read it to see if anything may be of interest.

Now as to eBook formats, you want ePub, Mobipocket, MS Reader, and PDF (not an eBook format).

Now, since you've foolishly used Word, you will have a lot of work ahead of you. Save your document as HTML and use Calibre to convert it to ePub. Now take the ePub and clean it up. get rid of all the crap/garbage that Word added in. make it very clean and neat code. Once you have that fixed so it is nice and neat code and it looks good, small margins, no line spaces between paragraphs except for sections breaks, justified, and the main text is the default font size, run it through FlightCrew t find any code errors and fix them. Then once that's done and you've looked at every page in ADE, then use Calibre to convert it to Mobipocket and MS Reader.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

More free time and clean/dry hands.

I have that.

The method is called "dirty windows".

Nobody yet has convinced me simultaneously that a) clean windows are necessary, and b) their window cleaning is the best way to obtain them. In order for someone to run a successful window cleaning business in a town of people with my mindset, they'd have to overcome that very, very critical hurdle and convince all of us that we need them to clean our windows. If they can't, their business will fail.

Taking it a bit further, imagine a business you could pay to paint decorations on your windows. They really exist, though they generally work for commercial clients. You want to exploit the untapped home market. You have to know exactly who your market consists of: Should it include only homeowners, or do some or all renters have sufficient control over their windows? Which HOAs allow people do do what they like with their windows and which don't? Are there city regulations against it? Will some people think "yeah, that's a good idea, but I can paint my own"? If you don't know your market, then you'll be trying to pitch your service to someone in a subdivision where even the kind of shrubs he plants are limited by the HOA, and missing the renter whose landlord doesn't care what they do with their windows so long as it comes off when they move. And then there's the matter of knowing your product. It can't be just "um, I do things to windows." Are you going to limit it to snowflakes or spring flowers because you can't paint people with both legs the same length? What about trademarked characters, say if someone wants Superman? Do you have religious qualms, like not wanting to paint another religion's holy images? Or, for that matter, your own? Do you want to include words, and if so which? Where do you draw the line between "Happy Birthday Susan", "Vote for Susan", and "Susan is a pinhead"?

See what I mean? Even something as simple as a business painting flowers on people's windows (hey, they'll hide the dirt!) takes an intimate knowledge of your market and your product. Without those, you can't succeed. You have to know exactly what you're selling, and you have to know exactly why people will buy it from you. Also, you have to give those people a reason to buy it in the first place, and buy it from you instead of somebody else. Without those, you're just putting work into an elaborate but ultimately futile failure.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The website is too busy. People will tend to just leave instead of bothering to read it to see if anything may be of interest.

Interesting, I must have skipped by the website link. Just took a look at it, and it was confusing to me.

Column 1: "Solutions Now" (huh?) that has what appears to be random articles ("Google: Friend or Foe", "Why Animals are Better Than People", "The Internet Society", "Home Theater Buying Guide"). Is this site an aggregator, or are all these articles written by the same person? If the latter, I'm not sure a portfolio of writing belongs here.

Column 2: "Songster", which appears to be articles all about music.

Column 3: "Entertainment Cyberscope Blog" (huh?). More random articles, and that "Home Theater Buying Guide" shows up again.

Column 4: "StoryTeller", which appears to be articles about writing, but there are also random pictures of checks from 2002...???

Column 5: "Time Travel", appears to be an Event Calendar. Event Calendar for what? I've no idea.

...and the homepage goes on and on. It's 6 full screens on my monitor.

I think I can sum up this whole site with the page dedicated to MIDI. Or perhaps the plea for a loan co-signer.

[WT Sharpe]

The beauty of using Word is that after conversion to HTML (just a simple "save-as"), you can pretty much set up calibre to produce a conversion that's pretty close to WYSIWYG*. The downside is that HTML files are huge, and can slow calibre down in the conversion process.


* What You See Is What You Get

[WT Sharpe]

I should add that you'll rarely get a book to appear in an ereader exactly the way it looks in Word, because ereaders use their own default fonts, among other reasons. But there are a few tricks for adding margins and eliminating spaces between paragraphs and the like.

[queentess]

Upon looking at the Thumbtack link provided on the website (which I won't link to because it contains personal information), I think I've had an epiphany. Is this site essentially a writing portfolio to find writing jobs?

If so, I think the site could be cleaned up a lot and it should be clearly communicated that "here are some links to my past work for you to read" and "I'm available for hire, here's my contact information".

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

But there are a few tricks for adding margins and eliminating spaces between paragraphs and the like.

Things like that should be left for the reader to decide.

[chamekke]

Worldwalker may express himself bluntly, but his advice can't be beat. If you want to be successful, build the foundation first.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

The beauty of using Word is that after conversion to HTML (just a simple "save-as"), you can pretty much set up calibre to produce a conversion that's pretty close to WYSIWYG*. The downside is that HTML files are huge, and can slow calibre down in the conversion process.


* What You See Is What You Get

The beauty of using Word? There is no beauty. Have you seen how bad the code inside the HTML is? And once you convert to ePub, it can be a nightmare to them have to go into the ePub to clean up the mess Word made. Word is garbage when it comes to making HTML and then ePub from that.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The beauty of using Word? There is no beauty. Have you seen how bad the code inside the HTML is? And once you convert to ePub, it can be a nightmare to them have to go into the ePub to clean up the mess Word made. Word is garbage when it comes to making HTML and then ePub from that.

All I can say is that I've had very good experiences with it.