Category: Publishing Process

Upload has been available for purchase on Kobo for nearly five months, and not a soul has bought it.  The book has a rating of 4.56 on Goodreads.  Sales certainly aren’t astronomical elsewhere, but it seems a bit odd that nobody has bought it on Kobo.  Is this just me?  Or is Kobo doomed?

Some of my fellow indie authors have found the process for becoming a Goodreads Author a bit obscure.  I thought it might be handy to write out the process in what I think is its simplest form:

1. Become a Goodreads member, if you aren’t already

2. Search for one of your titles

3. If your book isn’t on Goodreads, click the button at the bottom of the search results page… the one that says, “Still can’t find the book?  Add a new record”

4. Once your book is on Goodreads, search for yourself as an author

5. At the bottom of the basic author profile page for you, there should be a link that says, “Is this you?”  Click that and request approval.

Click here for Details on the Author Program.

Hope that helps!

Unsatisfied with the tools I’ve come across, I decided to build the ePub file for “Upload” from scratch.  I followed the detailed instructions in this very helpful article, and I ran into a problem when I got to the part where you’re supposed to “Package and check your EPUB”.  When I ran the epubcheck tool (java -jar epubcheck-3.0b5.jar Upload.epub), I got this output:

Epubcheck Version 3.0b5

Validating against EPUB version 2.0
ERROR: Upload.epub: I/O error reading OEBPS/content.html
ERROR: Upload.epub/OEBPS/toc.ncx(60,45): 'Chapter7': fragment identifier is not
defined in 'OEBPS/content.html'

After doing a bit of searching, I discovered that the I/O error was probably due to a character that is not valid XML content.  And the subsequent “fragment identifier is not defined” error stemmed from the fact that the I/O error had caused the epubcheck tool from reading past some illegal character in Chapter 6, since all of my chapters are in one XHTML file, “content.html”.

The problem, then, was locating the illegal character in Chapter 6 that was causing the I/O error.  I started with the brute-force approach: visually scan the content of Chapter 6 in search something that seems wonky.  This proved to be fairly tricky, and I realized that a simple regex search should uncover any characters outside the usual set of letters, numbers, and punctuation characters that one finds in a novel.  I opened my content.html file in good old Textpad, searched for illegal characters using the regex pattern below, and quickly discovered that I had copied-and-pasted a “smart quote” apostrophe from Word.  If you have additional punctuation, you may find that you have to tweak this pattern, but I hope it will at least get you pointed in the right direction:

[^-a-zA-Z <>"',./0-9:=\?&;#!()]

The basic idea is to look for any character that is NOT one of the common characters in U.S. English prose.

In case you are not familiar with regular expressions, I will give you a VERY brief breakdown of that pattern.

First off, the square brackets define a class of characters.  Typically, with square brackets, you’re telling the regex software to look for any character which falls within the defined class.  For example, this simple class definition matches any lower-case character:

[a-z]

However, that’s the white-list approach to searching: you’re defining the class of characters that you want to match.  What we really want here is to define a class of characters that we want to skip over, so that we can find the illegal characters.  This problem is easily solved by adding a caret (‘^’) as the first character in square brackets.  For example, the pattern below will match any character which is not a lower-case letter:

[^a-z]

This black-list approach allows you to define the class of characters you don’t want to match on.  If anything else comes along, match that instead.

Extending that concept, I came up with what proved to be a sufficiently large class of characters to catch any character in my novel that wasn’t “normal”.  Anything outside the “normal” class was probably something that XML doesn’t like, which would have to be replaced by either a “normal” character (e.g., a simple apostrophe instead of a smart-quotes apostrophe) or a special XML-encoded version of the character.  (There’s a pretty good list of XML-encoded characters on Wikipedia.)

So, with my handy-dandy regex pattern, I can search my novel for illegal characters, make substitutions as necessary, rebuild my ePub file, and then run it through epubcheck again.

Hope that helps!

So far, I’ve had really great experiences with the customer support folks at Lulu.  In this particular case — and this is one to watch out for, Lulu authors — I discovered that the first forty-or-so pages of “Upload” were repeated.

I ordered it as a sample copy, and just happened to be flipping through it when I noticed that the page numbering seemed odd.  I discovered the title page… on what should have been page 41.

I filled out the complaint form on Lulu’s website, and they responded immediately, requesting that I send photos of the error.  I snapped a picture with my phone.  Within a couple of days, they got back to me asking whether I would prefer a refund or a replacement copy.  All rather painless.  Thanks, Lulu!