HateHATEHATEhateALSOHATE

I have a shiny edited file of the Goblin novella in my hot little hand.

I am trying to format it for self-pub.

I HATE EVERYTHING THAT HAS EVER LIVED AND I’M NOT FEELING GREAT ABOUT FUTURE GENERATIONS EITHER

I stripped everything out in a text editor and then Kevin said “Hey, you can do that much easier in Scrivener and it will compile it to ePub” and then we spent four hours figuring out how to do that and then I went to Smashwords and OH LOOK, THEY ONLY TAKE WORD DOCS.

So I spent the last two hours formatting the Word doc to go into Smashwords. Will it work? I don’t know. I’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.

I feel it is important to know how to do this so that I can either do it myself in the future or farm it out with a clear conscience forevermore. This is important. This is building character.

And at the moment, I would kinda like to set the entire Internet on fire and sow the ashes with salt and bleach and vinegar and maybe some Round-Up.

The next person who says that self-pub lets you have more control gets my laptop in their teeth. I have total control over this file, and you know what? IT SUCKS ALL THE ASS IN THE WORLD.

*muffled sobbing into gin bottle*

6 thoughts on “HateHATEHATEhateALSOHATE

  1. Anjela says:

    Figuring out ePub was SUCH A PAIN. *pets you!*

    I hope it helps if I mention that I will buy it the instant you let us know it’s available! And I’m sure I’m not alone. 🙂

  2. Janni Lee Simner says:

    I just put up my first backlist book this week, and yes yes YES. Getting the epub file to work for Kobo, BN, and Amazon wasn’t too bad, but then getting Smashwords to like my Word file so I could distribute to everyone else took up the better part of a day, first getting Smashwords to accept it, then getting it to actually look like what I’d sent them. Between Smashwords and Words’ quirks and the dysfunctional way they played together, by the end of the day I too pretty much hated everyone and everything.

    But it seems to be working now, so there’s that.

  3. Martha Crimson says:

    And here I thought I was the only one who hated when software and electronics backfire on you 😀 Scrivener, though a lovely program in many ways, also have a lot of strange hangups that make you scream at the screen while frothing at the mouth…

  4. Alina says:

    As a person who lays out text for publishing (the hardcover kind), I understand the feels. I’m so sorry.

    For what it’s worth, the learning curve for “killer” programs like Indesign is just as awful, so enjoy your gin in the knowledge you’re entirely justified.

  5. Norman Ramsey says:

    It’s an uber-geeky solution, but I’m thrilled with pandoc, which allows me to produce web pages, PDF, word documents, and a bunch of other stuff, all from a clean single source resembling Markdown. Highly recommended for future projects.

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