Kindle-Fire-HD-8

The Kindle Fire seems to give formatting problems without warning for self-publishers

Self-published author Catherine Tosko on why Amazon should write a story of their own before publishing other people’s.

Someone I know has just published their second book on Amazon and due to formatting issues has completely given up on selling any more books due to bad reviews, not about the book but about the formatting.

Then the same day, a friend, a well known self-publisher had the exact same problem with Kindle Fire formatting that I had six months ago when I published my book and is probably tearing his hair out as I write.

Why? Because you can’t even trust the Previewer you are sent to by Amazon to test the different formats for Kindle and iPhone and it’s basically becoming a massive problem to know which is skinny, which is fat and short, which is for photos, which needs headers – ridiculous.

What gets me is as a self-publisher is that I should be able to not worry if Amazon or Apple bring out a new device. I am not saying that CreateSpace/ Amazon should retrofit every single book uploaded to their system. No, I am suggesting something that as a web development specialist by trade I have suggested to many clients. Retrofitting is thinking inside the box and is of course impossible.

What needs to be done is some mad skills type thinking (well just smart thinking) on the bottom of the planning ladder.

When the concept of a Kindle Fire or whatever it will be next is actually not made.

Before the stakeholders plan what we call “user stories.” You see, what happens, or should happen in any product development is a stage that is a pre-planning stage, where people who know nothing about IT or machines or how the old “inter-web” works, but are investing in that product write down in layman’s terms what they expect to happen when they take that new machine out the box. There are several business methodologies for this including PRINCE2 and Agile.  These “stories” are literally like this and anyone can write them with a pen and paper (We used Post-Its on a white board):

agile_board

So what is missing in my opinion is that at the next planning meeting for a new “device” (the word makes me think of medieval torture) is someone to champion a user story like this: “I want a device that doesn’t require any existing publisher on Amazon to change the format of their already existing document so that they don’t suddenly find out via a bad review that their book is out of kilter because of the new device settings.”

Can’t really be that difficult.


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