Transcribing the next book
2012-11-24
Posted by: badanov
On the eve of the last sales campaign for "Newtonville", I got a notification that "The Sunday War" was rejected because of a lack of a proper table of contents.
The problem was that The Sunday War has footnotes, which Smashword's conversion program rejected. Originally I used the automatic footnote generating feature in Libre Office, but it was rejected. So I had to take all 40 notes and redo them. I then submitted the book and waited.
Subsequently, I did a number of changes to the book after a resubmission was rejected no fewer than seven times. Among those seven times I assumed, since Smashwords automatic conversion program doesn't always notify you as to why it rejects a manuscript, that a non-standard font was at least one of the reasons for rejection.
In my home, I have a FreeBSD central server, which I use the Linux laptop and the Windows desktop to access. On the laptop is Libre Office Writer, in a Fedora operating system. Fedora is one of those operating systems that disallows the use of some software if that software has legal encumbrances such as restrictive licenses. So, I am left without an acceptable font.
After searching on line I found a times new roman font to download. The process was easy. The font set, which is a True Type font, was installed using a program called kfontview. The font was downloaded, I opened kfontview and installed the times new roman font.
Now I can access the manuscript for my next book from either machine.
Why transcribing?
"Newtonville" was written in longhand. Much of it was written while I was unemployed, some of it while on vacation. Can't take the old Commodore 64 with you to write, so I bought a couple of legal pads and started writing. It;s just an added editorial layer. I write in longhand, then transcribe it and can edit it as I go along.
I don't do this for everything I write, so the joke I made two years ago about getting writer's cramp really is funny, since I didn't write any of those Mexican Drug War stories in longhand.
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