Illegal Aliens is alive

Maybe not well, but it’s up for preorder

You can get a copy of the first bit on instafreebie.

We (I had a fair bit of help from my collaborating author on this) used Amazon’s kindle create on this.

There are good things:

  • Fonts, images, and special formatting are preserved if you export to pdf first. So you can have drop characters for leading pages and pretty section dividers without a lot of bother.

Well, that’s about it.

It’s not too hard to use. Except it’s really hard to create a functional table of contents.

There are, however, bad things too. When you export to pdf it is tricky to save the links from the document – i.e. the table of contents.  Make sure you tell word to save the internal bookmarks.  Check that they’re there with a pdf reader. Then when you get to importing it into the kindle create you should see a table of contents entry. It will be blank, but as you page through the document you should see it light up (there’s a box that will get checked) when you get to a chapter break.  You’ll see whatever symbol you used for the internal bookmark displayed below that. If like my collaborator, you’re a computer scientist, it will be a hexadecimal number. Who in their right mind wants to see that? Replace it with the chapter title.

If you don’t have a functional table of contents you’ll get a well-documented  error at the end of the publication process. It will say, “an unexpected error occurred.” The amazon people don’t know what that means either. It took us a couple of days to figure that one out.

Author: Amelia

A mild-mannered professor of computer science in real-life, I remove my glasses in the evening to become, well, a mild-mannered author in my alternate reality. I mostly write sweet romantic fiction, although with an occasional science-fiction or paranormal angle thrown in. I have interests in history, mathematics (D'oh), and cryptography. I'm also something of an Anglophile, and know that country pretty well. In addition to writing, research, and more writing, I volunteer with the scouts. I'm something of a nature-nut, enjoying long walks in the country with almost ultra-light gear, boating, and identifying wildlife.

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