We worked really, really hard on it. Which might seem surprising, for a totally fake book. Why put so much time and effort into a fake poetry anthology?<\/p>\n
Because too many poetry E-books are, in a word, bad. The poems may be lovely, but the coding is bad. Lines break in funny places. There are blank pages and mysterious gaps. Enjambed lines don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t indent. The tables of contents make no sense. The hardware and software for E-books were not designed with poetry in mind.<\/em> It isn’t our fault, but it’s still our problem<\/a>. Poets and editors have to work extra-hard to create E-books that remain faithful to the poem. We have to ask one another for help and advice. The poetry community needs to share its best practices. The Yellow Buick Review<\/em> is a fake poetry anthology, but it is also a sincere conversation piece: let’s talk about poetry in the age of the E-book.<\/p>\n What follows are a series of tutorials, in which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll take The Yellow Buick Review<\/em> from a basic Microsoft Word document to a polished Amazon Kindle E-book. You can download every file<\/a>, at every stage of the production process. You can see the problems I solved, the problems I eluded, and the problems that eluded me. Because the poems are total nonsense, they are also a non-issue, in terms of content (or pride). All the energy is on the presentation and the technical underpinnings.<\/p>\n This may not be the BEST<\/em> way to create a rich, elegant, standards-compliant poetry E-book, but it is the method we currently use here at the office. We still have a lot to learn, but we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re getting pretty good at this, all the same.<\/p>\n Here it is in one diagram: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll go through each of these steps in more detail later, but first, allow me to anticipate some problems and concerns.<\/p>\n 1. Dump the book into a big MS Word Document.<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201cI hate MS Word. \u00e2\u20ac\u201cWhy use MS Word at all if you set your books in InDesign? Just use Amazon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s InDesign plugin. 2. Use Character Styles and Paragraph Styles to make things look nicer.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u201cWhy bother with MS Word Styles if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be tweaking everything in CSS in step 3? 3. Export the MS Word document into two files: a big HTML file and a Cascading Style Sheet.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u201cUhm, MS Word doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t export a separate CSS file, it uses a style sheet in the HTML header.<\/em> 4. Split the big HTML file into sections.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u201cWhy?<\/em>
\n(click to enlarge<\/em>)<\/p>\n![\"Bicycle](\"http:\/\/www.bicycle-comics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/E-book_Flow_All.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong><\/em>Me, too! I prefer Open Office for documents and Adobe InDesign for books, but MS Word is ubiquitous, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll meet people where they live, you know?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong><\/em>As of this writing, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not getting optimal results with the Amazon Plugin<\/a>. Also, while publishers such as Bicycle Comics have the full Adobe Creative Suite, many small journals and self-published authors can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford it. Finally, the Amazon plugin locks you into Amazon. It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t generate .epub files for iPad, Nook, or Google Play. The way we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing it, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll end up with files for every platform.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong><\/em>I actually agree with you. But some people just won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel confident about exporting unless they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve cleaned things up in Word.<\/p>\n
\nTrue. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get to that when we cover step 3.<\/p>\n
\nSome older E-readers (not Kindles) prefer smaller chunks. Also, it makes Tables of Contents and section markers much easier.<\/p>\n