Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Sunday, March 25, 2018

A65 is done...

After nearly 2 weeks of trying to save my Word doc into a PDF without an ICC Color Profile, including buying into Adobe Acrobat Pro, I find out it can't be done with a Mac. At least, not through them. I finally got it down to where I was able to get rid of the color profile, but the program wouldn't embed the fonts and the file was so degraded, it was useless.

What angers me is, I told the Acrobat IT people what kind of computer I had, what I was making my file in and what I wanted to do and they kept having me try all kinds of shit till they finally acknowledged reality. Meaning I had to. If I take my Word file to a PC and open it up, all the pagination is off. And when I save it through a PC-connected printer to a PDF, it splits the sections into separate files, then I have to remerge them...and some of the Word commands disappear, meaning I have to allow for that.

So...I went back through the story, checked to make sure everything was still in order, and saved it then uploaded it and my dust jacket art to Ingram. Now I'm waiting to see how it turns out. When I get the PDF proof, I'll know if everything came together, format-wise. Then I'll order a printed proof to make sure...and hopefully the book will print okay.

I don't remember having this much trouble when I redid The Lyons' Den or did The Vanishing of Owen Taylor, but I worked those up on my old laptop and did run them through my PC at work. And I had a bitch of a time getting everything in order, shifting from Mac to PC. But we've upgraded some of our programs and this time, when I tried to do it, the color profile was still embeded.

Oh, well...I also set up the ebook with Kindle, which was a lot easier to do. That should be available by the end of the week. And if this doesn't work for the print book, in hardback, I'll go with Create Space to do a paperback. I can work that off my ebook. I'm not crazy about using Amazon but if the others won't fix it so you can do your thing with them, without this kind of crap, then what else can I do? It's time for the story to be out there and available to read.

Now I guess I'll find out if it makes any sense...

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