Today was going to be my Get The Minerva Wakes Hardcover Done day.
But I work exclusively on a Mac.
And in indie publishing, POD publishers give no love to the Mac.
I did a gorgeous job of formatting the book.
- All chapters on right-hand pages.
- No headers or page numbers on chapter pages.
- Nothing on blank left-hand pages opposite new chapters.
- Good fonts
Went to embed the fonts into a PDF. Guess what Mac doesn’t do?
Exported to Word, uploaded to my POD publisher.
- My two fonts (Garamond and Helvetica) became Times New Roman.
- Multiple extra pages appeared at each point where I had a section break.
- Headers and page numbers appeared on both chapter pages and blank facing pages.
I have spent an entire workday trying to work around this, and I am in the mood now to punch penguins and snarl at kittens.
So today I accomplished…
Nothing.
I hate days like this.
Did you know that Garamond is not free for commercial use? It’s owned by Monotype Foundry. Their license fee was too steep for my budget, so I found a free font I like better anyway.
Yep. Yep. Yep. I have had experiences like this. Nonsensical tech glitches drive me crazy! I guess we should be thankful we’re not still setting every letter by hand in those old-fashioned printing presses. More: how wonderful that as independent authors we at least have the opportunity to put our stuff out there without waiting for approval from the Big Publishing gatekeepers! The life of an indy author has its frustrations, but it’s worth it, right? Right!
Aw, Holly. I feel your pain. Consider it a learning experience. I know … much easier said than done. You’re still my hero. You offer hope to the rest of us. You will awake to battle writing another day. You are a warrior and a survivor! March on! Write on!
Hugs. Cross-formatting is such a pain.
For what it’s worth, changing everything from TNR to Garamond is easy in Word, but you’ll need to hunt down all the chapter titles one by one afterward, unless the heading indexing came through. Feel free to contact me if you need help.