Friends, I'm honored to share that I am now a published author with my book available at the link below! This book comprises the first 12 years of my publications showcasing highlights of my Archive, as well as select previously unpublished works.
There were several breakthroughs which helped me accelerate the timeline of the project. First, I amassed 339 of my articles from 12 years of publishing online in just 5.5 hours. Second, I taught myself RegEx to batch process all formatting to clean up the raw text. Third, I discovered a free extension to format 1,388 images in under 2 minutes. Then I developed a process which permitted me to burn through 1,400 pages of material in just 2 hours.
Unfortunately, the remaining work seemed insurmountable. Due to a glitch in the conversion, I had to go sentence by sentence through the remaining 2,000 pages of text to correct all the missing paragraph breaks and all 1,388 mis-positioned images. I feared I might have to quit my job and devote my full attention to the project to complete it in any reasonable span of time, but I worked hard through May and into June and by June 15th I’d completed the reformatting of all 289 finally-selected articles. I tidied up the book and carefully analyzed the subsequent text and images so as not to create more problems in the process. There were a few minor anomalies I was unable to remove without compromising the remaining text, but nothing which impairs readability so I was able to move forward.
Thereafter I proactively researched and drafted a design brief to commission the cover artwork and to register the ISBN. The brief included a short author bio, a back-cover blurb, a summary of my business brand, my target audience, values to communicate in the cover design, stylistic preferences, output specs, and example images of books by competing authors in my field. This was a serious endeavor and I worked to ensure that every aspect of the project was handled as professionally as possible.
I did discover, due to the substantial page length of my manuscript, that it exceeds the maximum length for a printable paperback or hardcover by Amazon’s terms of service, so unfortunately this will be exclusively issued in the ebook format. But as I’ve incorporated hundreds of links to web content on sites like YouTube, perhaps it will function best as a digital edition. The only other way to get a printed version would be to issue the book in a series of volumes, but I’m not ready for that presently. At least as an ebook it made the design process markedly simpler to implement.
I encountered one last critical hurdle when I attempted to upload my finalized PDF using the PDF Upload button on Amazon's Kindle Store. Tragically, the button returned a red "X" with no error message when I tried to upload my book. I contacted their support team and they explained that they only support simple PDFs without images or significant length.
They suggested I try their native ebook conversion utility, but it is only available for Windows and Mac users, and I use Linux. They offered to convert it for me manually on their end, and I similarly tried converting it locally using the popular Calibre application. Sadly, the .epub and .mobi outputs of the book compromised all formatting and it looked awful.
Undeterred and determined to succeed, I researched alternatives and successfully published through Google Books who support PDF with no conversion necessary. The book is live at last!
Publishing this book is a dream come true for me! This is particularly gratifying as my writings will remain long after I've left this earth for the whole world to enjoy and to continue inspiring rewarding listenership for years to come.
Check out
The Ghost of Madame Curie: Writings from Innerspace Labs at the link below!
https://play.google.com/store/books/...d=8_J3EAAAQBAJ
