I hate inefficiency. It really, truly drives me nuts. And when I have the ability to control situations, I fix the inefficiencies that I find. But unfortunately with self-publishing I’m at the mercy of the distributors and their whacked out notions of how things should work.
Which is why I spent about an hour this morning checking the blurbs of my books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and fixing them.
See, with Amazon when you used to publish through CreateSpace if you just typed in a book description like I’m typing this post right now everything would show up on Amazon as one big chunk of text with no paragraph breaks. But when you published an ebook through KDP it showed up just fine.
Same text, different outcomes.
Now, you’d think that when they migrated print books to KDP Print that they’d fix this issue, right? I mean, it’s the same interface you’re using. The description book looks identical for the print and ebook versions.
But they didn’t. So you type in your description and use your little Enter key for paragraph breaks and for an ebook everything looks just like you wanted it when the book is published. But for paperbacks, it publishes as one big wall of text.
It looks fine on the screen where you entered the information, at first, but come back to that screen later and all your paragraph breaks will be gone.
You need to use HTML tags <p> and </p> around each paragraph to get it to display in paragraphs on Amazon.
I know this, but sometimes I forget. Or sometimes I used bold and italics for a header line and then don’t put the paragraph mark around it as well and that first line scrunches up against the next paragraph. So, fifteen or so revisions later, I’m finally done with fixing all of my paperback descriptions.
Barnes & Noble’s NookPress is it’s own version of hell.
Because it has an input screen just like Amazon and then there’s a little tab you can click that lets you see a preview. Great, right? No guessing. You can see what it will look like before you publish.
Except that preview requires that you use HTML coding to get paragraphs in your text. The only way to get that preview looking “right” is to use not just paragraph breaks but a <br> break as well. But…
(And here’s where it gets fun.)
When you then go to the Barnes & Noble website it looks like crap if you actually did that. Putting in paragraph and break HTML to get it looking good in the preview when you’re submitting the book results in the book description on the website having something like three extra lines between each paragraph.
Seriously.
It does not have to be this f’ed up.
Amazon: Just make it consistent. And let people know how it works, whichever way you go.
Barnes & Noble: Line your frickin’ preview up with how the page will actually look when it publishes.
Alright. Rant over.
Happy Mother’s Day to those of you who are mothers. Condolences to those of you missing a mother today. (And for those of you thinking I’m nuts because it’s not Mother’s Day, for some reason there is not agreement on which day Mother’s Day should be celebrated around the world. Today is the American one.)
M.L. Humphrey 