My Publishing Week in Review

Believe it or not, I do have a couple of projects on my plate. One, of course, is trying to get my novel converted to an audiobook using Spotify's free service. It's not going well. I did email author support to let them know how disappointed I was in its draconian character limits. Even after stripping out all the hidden metadata from my epub, the app still told me to "upload a shorter book". What, Spotify? Are you a critic now, too? My book is just fine as is; I'm certainly not going to edit out words because you say so.

I, of course, felt like I was emailing into the wind, but I did receive a response.

"Thanks for reaching out to Spotify for Authors. We'll check your EPUB uploading concerns.

We appreciate you raising this to us. For us to double check, could you please send us a whole screenshot of the screen where you encounter the error message. This will help us take a further look.

We'll be on the look out for your response."

Yes, frankly, I expect them to refine their process...specifically for me (kidding). But let's all acknowledge how stupid their limitations are. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd think they were deliberately trying to discourage us.

AI wants me to split my manuscript into two parts, upload both, then merge the halves together, download each chapter (forty of them) one by one and create one big file I can re-upload. This seems...what's the word? Stupid? Add to that the fact that you and I both know it won't work. Sure, AI and I have become buddies of a sort, but that doesn't mean I necessarily trust him.

"An unreliable narrator is a storyteller in a book, movie, or show...(or online?)...whose credibility, accuracy, or honesty is compromised, meaning the audience cannot fully trust their version of events."

I don't expect anything to change just because I complained, but as defensive as IT people tend to be, bringing an issue to their attention can't hurt. That said, I'll probably never hear from them again.

 

Now my legacy book...

If you've been reading along, you know how sick to death of this project I am. I ruled out the majority of memorygram's prefab questions, inserted a few of my own, and I now feel insecure about my book's short length. The company tells me I have enough content to publish my book, however, so I've decided to just go with it and be done.

Well, not so easy. I'm a huge advocate of em dashes, AI be damned. I'm not going to change for a robot. But memorygram's interface doesn't support them. I even asked its chatbot about it. So, anytime I wrote a story in Word, then copied and pasted it into the app, it looked fine until I pulled up the preview. Then it appeared as if I'd hyphenated unrelated words. "We got a-you guessed it..." What's "a-you"? Is that phonetic writing making fun of an Italian accent?

Every damn story looked like that! Chatbot told me I could either do this: "--" (I don't like it) or "paste it from Word and it should hold." It doesn't! That's my problem! My compromise was to do a space, then a hyphen, then another space. It looks like crap, but it's all I've got. What that meant was that I had to paste every single story from the app back into a Word doc, search for every hyphen, apply my compromise solution, then re-paste the story into the app. That took most of the day (seriously).

Now I'm in the process of reading through the entire book. Guess what? My life's not all that interesting, even to me. Repetitive reading only makes things worse. Now I'm beginning to question if some of my "stories" are even worth including. But it's too late to back out now. 

This is reminiscent of book editing. You read the story and re-read the story until you develop a seething hatred for it. More than once I've wanted to punch my MC in the face after the tenth reading. 

At this rate, maybe my memory book will be done in a week or so. 

So, to sum up:

1. Spotify won't let me create my audiobook.

2. My "memories" belong in a junk heap.

Not exactly a successful week in the publishing game.