So, there I am, happily filling out tax forms and uploading manuscripts, getting Guardian ready on the various e-reader platforms, minding my own business when WHAM.
Kobo. Blessed Kobo, domain of friendly Canadians and an important gateway to European readers. I load up the .epub in Calibre (a fabulous tool for this sort of work) and everything looks great! I load the file onto Kobo and, out of healthy caution, I check the file on Kobo’s E-Reader via its desktop application.
The cover image is stretched as wide as it is tall. So are the maps. I put one up on this image for comparison. It looked ugly as sin. Of course, I immediately had a conniption fit and nearly destroyed my 10-year-old Surface. Again. After several hours of googling and more than a few (hilarious) attempts at re-coding the images, I finally found the problem and resolved it.
(Then I got errors about the images missing “alt” tags…which Kobo will ignore, but Apple will not. So, had to sot those out, too.)
THE GOOD NEWS:
Guardian is available for Pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (e-books only). It is in standby with Apple, Google, and Kobo, waiting for final approvals. Kobo should go pretty quick, Google as well,
Apple…is not known for being a friendly platform for self-publishing. Limbo can be as short as a few days to as long as four months. It’s kinda weird, because Apple is often regarded as one of the companies that helped indie publishing become viable by forcing better royalty rates. For whatever reason, the iTunes platform for book publishing is just garbage, which is frustrating. A lot of folks don’t actually publish directly with Apple, instead distributing to them from somewhere else and taking the royalty cut in favor of quality of life.
On the print side, Amazon print is set for the 17th (Woot!) and Ingram is in process reviewing, which can take several days. I can’t do print preorders thought Amazon…but I can through Ingram, but they probably won’t be ready before everything goes live so it doesn’t really matter. The main reason I’m working on Ingram is for future distribution/ordering inventory for myself to then sell when I do events.
It’s slow work, but Guardian will not only launch soon but launch on all major e-reader platforms!
TylerTillerson.com 