Making a book is easy – Hah!

Don’t you believe it for a minute.

I started out using MobiPocket Creator to make a file which the Amazon web site would convert into a Kindle book. It sort of worked.

Of course it looked like it was assembled by a typesetter on LSD. There were unexplained gaps and lines and indents…and sometimes what I wanted centered would be on the left margin. At one point all my hyphens showed up as solid black triangles.

Well it turned out a great deal of the trouble was I didn’t know how to use MS Word properly to produce a correct .doc file in the first place. I’m 64 years old and learned to type on a mechanical typewriter. It’s a miracle I could work around being deaf to learn to word process on a computer at all.

It certainly didn’t help that Word 2009 fights me tooth and nail in many ways. If you started any files before knowing you MUST have a .doc file to convert it will never forget you started that document without specifying a .doc file in your options. It will change back to a .docx file at every opportunity – even if you go in and change the default in the system registry. You must convert the document – reset the options to save as .doc and do a save as choosing .doc – three separate steps every time you save. It’s worse than Simon says. MS is evil because they know better than the customer what is good for him.

I really didn’t appreciate that the one book I bought made fun of elderly people for using the TAB function to indent paragraphs. But after taking the time and space to mock us he said it was not the purpose of his book to teach us how to use Word. He assumed (demanded) that we know how to use it properly in order to follow his instructions, although he obviously had cataloged a number of such common errors. He was above sharing them with us.

I now have a copy of the software caliber downloaded and I understand it will make an even cleaner file for Amazon to convert. Perhaps after I am done learning it I can get the page numbers for the table of contents over on the right side of the page where they belong.

I’m not sure – but I think those of you who have bought my books and found these terrible formatting errors can delete the copy in their Kindle and force a newer copy from your Manage my Kindle page. I’d appreciate your experience if you try that.

I very much appreciate all of you readers who looked beyond these faults to enjoy the story I had to tell. It is of great value to me if you will give me your thoughts and review my books on Amazon. – Thank you. – Mac’