I have sold almost 500 copies of my novels via Kindle format and Amazon. I hear from many of you who have bought them...raves and not-so-raves. What is puzzling to me is why some can download a great copy of my books and others get copies which are corrupted with sentences jumbled, punctuation duplicated, etc?
Now, I format each and every book using the same font, font size, and everything else in Kindle following their guidelines to the letter. I'm so anal compulsive about it, I reread the instructions each and every time I upload a book. I want to get things right. When I browse the conversion with PDF everything looks right. When I check it out with E-Pub, it's right. I know it is right in Word. I painstakingly edit and tweak until almost every word and spacing is correct.
Why is it only some copies which come out skewed and not all copies? Of course if someone really wanted the MOBI format they could download it from Smashwords.com. But Amazon is a strong contender for sales. I am concerned about the lower stars because of the formatting issues from these corrupted files. I'm hearing comments like..."Really enjoyed your book, but the formatting sucked" and "Would have given it five stars if it wasn't for the punctuation and sentence jumbles."I've gotten a handful of emails and messages on this and am considering pulling all my Kindle uploads which would hurt sales.
It's those handful of people who sent me a message that concerns me. How many more out there did not get a clean copy and just haven't said anything. This does not bode well for me trying to break into the fiction market. Right now I'm kicking myself in the backside.
Keep writing and loving the Lord.
Jo,
ReplyDeleteMy copy was mangled, but not so much that I commented. It seems that many books are. I've even seen a few boo-boos in one of Diana G.'s books. I think it's the newness of the process issue, but I may be wrong.