While you want a lot of things to go wrong in your story, ideally, you want it to be smooth sailing when you’re bringing your book, especially your first book, to market. You’re putting something out into the world, and you want everything to go perfect so the reader has an enjoyable experience and wants to come back for more.
Publishing Dig Down was not an easy journey. You may ask what could possibly go wrong when self-publishing a book on a website that tries to make it’s directions as smooth and user friendly as possible.
Sometimes, it felt like everything could go wrong.
I went through a lot of trials and tribulations to bring Dig Down to market. Some of them were unavoidable. This is one of them.
For starters, the paperback and e-book are actually 2 different formats of the same story. If you have a paperback copy of Dig Down, you’ll notice that a new chapter doesn’t begin on the following page, but will start right on the same page that the prior chapter ended, provided there is enough room. This is the intended reading experience. It’s a short book, with mostly short chapters, it seemed like a waste of paper to just start each chapter on a new page, and by having one chapter lead into the next on the same page, I was hoping to creating a flow that would get the reader to keep reading.
I tried to do this with the e-book. But every time I skimmed through the layout of how the pages would look on an e-reader, it seemed EVERY chapter would end at the bottom of a page, creating a situation where only the chapter number would fit on the page, maybe the timestamp as well, but the chapter itself wouldn’t start until the next page, which just looked awful and unprofessional.
What was worse was that when I first switched the format so that a new chapter would begin on a new page, I ran into the reverse problem. Now there were a handful of chapters that would end with orphans. What that means is a chapter would end with only a few words, (and in one case, only one word), spilling onto a brand new page only to end the chapter, leaving the rest of the page blank because now the new chapter would start on its own brand new page. This also looked awful and unprofessional, in a completely new way.
Time and again, I kept trying to fix the pages so that it would look good until I realized something. If you have a kindle or e-reader, you may already be aware of my mistake. For e-readers, people can change aspects of the book to suit their preferences. For instance, some people may have poor eyesight, and will enlarge the text.
If they had control over the way they wanted the book displayed, it meant I didn’t have to keep raking myself over the coals trying to get it just right, because if someone didn’t like the way it was presented, they could just change the format to something they did. I’d been reading a book using the kindle app on my phone and couldn’t tell you where on the page the text ended before a new chapter began, so I doubted anyone would be able to tell that I had a few words carryover onto a new page before the chapter ended.
So, I just made sure each chapter started on a fresh page, regardless of where the prior chapter ended, and published. It wasn’t an attitude of “This is the reader’s problem now” because with the reader having complete control of the presentation once they bought the book, it wasn’t a problem at all.
If I were to try to put a positive spin on it, I’d say that I’d at least learned not to spend so much energy on making sure the e-book’s format was perfect since anyone could just go in and change things to their liking after the fact. I just don’t think it was worth the hours I spent learning that lesson.