A question about electronic publishing

[I. J. Parker]

I hope someone has some advice here.  I pay to have my books formatted.  They come back looking very good indeed and I upload.

 

Here's the problem: can I, after that point, make any corrections to the text?  I have the prc and epub files, but is it possible to edit them???

 

I'd like to fix a couple of glitches but can't very well go back to the formatters with a new text.

[Charles Kelly]

Books like this can be fixed and "republished" over the top of the books already up there. In other words, the book would be published again, but the one already published would remain up for sale until the second version is published.  This does require reformatting, but it's quite easy to do if you know formatting.  I would think you should have an arrangement with your formatters that they will give you one or two "republishes" as part of the original price. For Amazon, you really need to know a little HTML to do this. I do it myself.  There's actually a short ebook I'm going to republish in a week or so.  But there's no easy fix if you don't do formatting. 

[Charles Kelly]

A follow-up.  I don't work with epub, so I can't answer as to that.  But you can edit the prc file in Mobipocket Creater (in html).  It may be a little scary if you've never done HTML, but things like word changes can easily be done.  However, changes in spacing or in fonts will require some complex formatting that you probably wouldn't want to try. 

[Dana King]

What Charles said. You can edit the document in the proper text editor, but you'll need some HTML background.

[I. J. Parker]

Thank you both.  I was afraid of that.  Maybe I'll raise the issue with my formatters.  Possibly for a small extra fee they might change a couple of words. No spacing etc. involved.

[Steven Torres]

If the problme is with the text - a misspelled word or something like that - then you don't need to know very much at all about html; just how to open and save files pretty much. If it is a glitch with the formatting, that could be a bit different.

[I. J. Parker]

Hah!  And hello, Steven.  So nice to have you around again.  I wonder if I can tinker with a prc file.  It's just a deletion and a replacement of a word at this point.

 

And Steven, AHMM bought another story of mine.  It's called "Confessions" and I'm pretty pleased with it.  No date of publication yet.  They were horridly slow answering.

 

Hope things are ok with you. 

[Steven Torres]

Hi,

Have you looked at Graham Powell's blog post from last year about doing the Kindle files yourself? http://www.myboogpages.com/2011/03/creating-a-kindle-book-with-mobi... 

 

I guess what you really need is to be able to open the file that has the error in it. If you can do that, you can easily make the correction, save the file, and rebuild the ebook. If you want to send me the file, and I can take a look and see if it can be opened. Of course, you might want to contact the company who did the work for you in the first place. They might have a helpful policy about this type of work as I'm sure you're not the first author in this predicament.

 

Nice about AHMM. That reminds me - email me off list. I'm looking to ask you a few questions for an article in Crimespree. Differences between novel writing and short story writing, that sort of thing. 

[I. J. Parker]

Thanks, Steven.  I'll probably go backl to my fomatters.  It might be a good idea to wait a little to see if there are any other glitches.  Will take a look at Graham Powell.  And will get in touch off-list.