The Joys of Learning

I research all sorts of science subjects in my spare time, not just to write a blog about what I've discovered, but because I enjoy learning new things. I love learning new tidbits of information that I can categorize and file in the proper drawer in my mind.

There's another aspect of my life where I find myself learning new things fairly regularly. It's the publishing portion of my life. Even though I belong to a number of groups where people talk about different aspects of publishing, every so often I find myself stuck, figuratively banging my head against a brick wall as I try to do something that looks so easy when others talk about it.

I think the first time this happened to me when I was just starting, and I was formatting short stories to be converted into e-books. It seemed like no matter how carefully I formatted the manuscript, I kept getting all sorts of error messages when I sent that first effort through the conversion software. That was where I learned the adage, "Read the guidelines, stupid." Yes, the owner of the software had a 100+ page book that he made available to users for free, and I had read the first 5 or 6 pages and figured that was enough.

It wasn't.

So I backed up a bit and read the entire book, taking special note of how to correct formatting problems. Turns out that formatting problems like I'd been having were possibly caused by file corruption created when the file has been through many, many forms of formatting. But there WAS a fix!

It sounded easy; take out all the formatting and start with a clean slate, format-wise. And getting rid of all that potentially-corrupted formatting was really easy to do, so I did it. Now for the down-side. Everything in my manuscript was now Times New Roman, 12 pt font, in body paragraphs. Now I had to go through the entire manuscript and put formatting back in: Chapter Headings and font size, centered; Title page things; back matter stuff... And once I had done that, I had to READ the manuscript and re-format anything that needed to be italicized, bolded, underlined. It was, all in all, a 4 or 5 day project, during which I got virtually nothing else done. But it works.

To this day, I cringe every time I decide I need to remove all the formatting and start over. But I do it, in order to get a good conversion to the various e-book formats. As my parents used to say, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Recently, I ran across a quick and simple method for inserting a Table of Contents. I took notes and tried it on my latest book. Something went wrong; every single paragraph of the manuscript was listed as a chapter in my Table of Contents. I tried 4 or 5 times, deleting the results after every attempt, before I gave up and did it the old way, which works for print books, but not so well for e-books.

So I backed up and re-read that style manual, looking for a better way to insert a ToC into my e-books. And I found the answer in those guidelines. Once again I had to delete all my evidently-corrupted formatting and set it up again. But 5 days later, when I followed the guidelines to insert a ToC, it worked! If I still had some flexibility in my shoulders, I would pat myself on the back! Who said an old dog can't learn new tricks?

Like I said earlier, I love learning new stuff.