Writing like any other work is ... work

I just finished publishing The Clan of the Black Sun - book 3 of The Juno Letters. It seemed a good time to reflect on the story and the versions of the print and e-books, especially since my audio producer, Gary Regal, just finished the audiobook of The Juno Letters - Book 1. Let's face it - e-books are just plain **** ugly. They appear like one long text message. It is difficult to put much formatting in one - I struggled to get the block quote of the letters and journals working for a long time. You cannot control the line spacing very well, and mixing things such as first line indents and flush lefts are trouble. I have a template now that allows me to safely do the three formatting things I need to tell the story, but I dare not change any of it. Every time I produce a book, I cross my fingers and pray to the SMASHWORDS gods. I still cannot get the Table of Contents to work right in Kindle and ePub. But they work well enough - given the state of the eBook world. I decided I could still create a beautiful book in print, so I redid the format of my books on CreateSpace. I use Trajan Pro for the headings, the same font I use in the covers, and a more readable text font. I have far more control over the layout, and get to use 'fleurons' - those curlycues and flower-like objects used as separators. The result is wonderful. Like I have written many times, a book SHOULD BE a work of art in form as well as writing. Apple make a program called iBooks Author that allows a writer to create an enhanced e-book using discrete formatting - plus a host of embedded gizmos - available only in landscape mode. In portrait mode it flows like an ebook - the best of both ... almost. The templates for the program are not well formatted for novels. I struggled with this for a log time, and gave up last summer. But I took another look - determined to create a solution. I jury-rigged a template to work in both portrait and landscape, and still produce the correct TOC. The result is an enhanced iBook version of the entire series on iTunes, and I am pleased how they turned out. There are some improvements I can make, I am certain, but compared to the average ePub, it is a work of art. Changes to iTunesConnect have made it easier to publish despite a couple of bugs I discovered and reported (it's a curse), but it still takes way too long for the books to go live. Such is the fun of being on the cutting edge of a new media revolution. Check out the iBooks version when they finally go live - available only on an iMac, iPad, and iPhone (probably iPod too). It is the closest thing to holding a real book you will find in e-format. If you have any other version of one of my books (not including NOCK, sorry) just email me and I'll send you the enhanced ibook version for free. I have reformatted all of the versions with some minor format improvements, and will replace any kindle or epub files as well. Email me at larryh@hewittmbm.com