Things Going Smoothly

#selfpub your travel blog to #KDP ?

My addiction to reading travel narrative has only increased since finishing my Appalachian Trail thru hike and being confined to an apartment and a job with no car.

I imagine myself everywhere else but here. The open road, on a beach, in the desert.

The problem is that there is a lot of awful stuff out there, ok, maybe awful is a little strong. How about half assed? But these “blog to book” books continue to get positive reveiws which push them up the Amazon charts which makes more sales which pushes them even higher.

As you already know most first time thru hikers will read a few books about the Appalachian Trail before setting out on their hike. It is sad that one of the most complained about books on the AT is also the best written. I’m talking about Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.

It is sad because most people despise this writer for failing to complete a thru hike. And yet they will read, and worse, praise a thru hikers book that reads like a blog. (Specific books wont be named, you know who you are.)

Blog post after blog post does not make a book.

Then again I might be wrong.

There are a lot of these in the travel category, books that are merely a compilation of blog posts and many of these continue to be on the bestseller lists.

Some are better at covering up the fact that they copied and pasted text from their website to create their book. Others like Bumfuzzle mention the fact that the book was taken directly from their blog in the introduction.

Despite being very interested in the premise of a novice sailing couple attempting to circumnavigate the globe in a 35 foot sailboat the blog post format turned me off and I stopped reading. Having lost interest trying to get through the sample there was no way I would be buying that book.

That and the fact that they had tons of money to start with, though that is more of a personal objection.

Take a book like Happier than a Billionaire, which was also converted from a blog, about quitting a job to move to Costa Rica and live on the cheap. Ahh, the zero hour work week in a tropical paradise, or so I thought. Selling your chiropractor practice and giant house to fund an early retirement isn’t my idea of adventure.

Besides which her problems all seemed over dramatized and blown out of proportion. Little problems with a big net to fall back on don’t really capture my imagination.

Again, a personal opinion. Her book is a bestseller in several Amazon categories and is well reviewed by the majority of readers.

So maybe the blog to book thing can work.

For some readers.

The benefits of the blog to book formula are the pre promotion for the book that the blog does and keeping the writer focused on a series of smaller pieces instead of facing the daunting task of writing a “whole” book.

After all, in the end you just have to cut and paste right?

And a blog can help you define your target audience and to let you know who your readers are before publishing. The importance of knowing your target audience can’t be underestimated. (Check out this useful post by DuoLit – Six Steps to Finding Your Target Market) And knowing that information could help you make small but significant changes to your blog prior to publishing it as a book which could greatly increase sales and improve reviews.

That will take a little more work than just copying and pasting but you might be infinitely happier with the results.

#selfpublishing your latest #Kindle #ebook shouldn’t be a hassle, but I had a hell of a time trying to figure out the proper formatting for the Table of Contents Amazon requires you to include in your Kindle ebook.

So I found my own easier way.

Everything I originally found online was confusing and even Amazon’s own free Kindle book, “Publish on Amazon Kindle with Kindle Direct Publishing” was vague.

After I thought I had it figured out Mobi Pocket Creator was still giving me the error message that there was no Table of Contents or TOC.

So I decided to turn to what I thought was an expert and paid for, “Just Tell Me Simply

I didn’t care that there were grammatical mistakes and editing problems every other page, as long as the information allowed me to create a TOC that Amazon could work with I’d be happy.

This Kindle book had me creating a seperate TOC.NCX file and editing the html code. On top of that the example pieces of code were pictures that were so small they couldn’t be read on my Kindle for Android app.

After following all of the confusing instructions Mobi Pocket Creator still failed to make a functioning TOC though I was no longer getting the error message.

Frustrated and falling behind in my writing because I was still trying to figure out how to put out a quality Kindle product there was no sense in trying the same thing over again.

I did everything the way it should have been done and it didn’t work.

So I’ll throw everything I know out the window and start fresh.

I noticed that when inserting bookmarks then converting to html the bookmarks were converted into a link with the index.html#bookmark format. I thought I could use that to designate not only links to each chapter like I did before I read the How To book, but I could also designate both a TOC and Start locations for the Kindle version.

Since I had already inserted bookmarks at the begining of each chapter it was easy enough to highlight the chapter name in in the Table of Contents then link within the document to the appropriate bookmark just like you would to any outside URL.

Then I added a TOC bookmark by placing the cursor at the begining of the Table of Contents and inserting a bookmark named toc.

Where I wanted Kindle to open up to I inserted a bookmark named start.

After saving my work I then saved the file in html format.

In Mobi Pocket Creator it is a simple matter to import from html. Then we go to the Guide option on the left hand side of the program to designate those guides within our document that we want to use.

We have only two, toc and start.

You can see in the picture below how to enter the information.

Of course instead of BabysittingPerverts.html it would be the name of your source html file followed by a # sign and toc or start depending on which one you are adding.

Now when you build your Kindle PRC file using Mobi Pocket Creator you will not get an error message, (hope you remembered to include a cover) and when opened in Kindle or any Kindle app the first location displayed should be where you inserted the start bookmark.

If you go to the location drop down menu you will see both the Table of Contents and Start listed as options.

That’s all there is to it.

No TOC.NCX files, no editing html code, just a simple application of bookmarks and the easy to use guide section of Mobi Pocket Creator and the worst of your formatting errors are over.

Have you ever had one of those conversations that blows your mind?

Like a life changing kind of thing that takes everything in your head and reassembles it in a new way?

That’s the kind of conversation this was. I don’t remember what the hell else we were talking about, maybe something about my new Twitter account and not being sure about what I was doing. But that’s irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is when she said, “My cat has 500 followers on Twitter.”

What? “Your cat has a Twitter account?”

“Yeah I just post meow or purr once in a while and upload a few pics here and there…”

Then I found out that as many as 1 in 10 pets has a Twitter account.

My mind is officially blown.

Sockington the cat, the most used Twitter pet example, has 1.5 million followers.

1.5 million people are interested in knowing what this cat is up to.

Move over Pinky and the Brain.

Of course humans have to do the actual tweeting, or anipals as they are called for those of you who don’t newspeak. But they love it.

Using their cat’s, dog’s or fishes voice on Twitter these anipals are raising money for a host of charities.

And we’re not talking chump change here.

This is big bucks on a regular basis to help animal shelters and other pet friendly orginizations.

We all knew that YouTube was owned by pet videos and cute babies.

Now it turns out the pets have taken Twitter as well.

Normally my intestines shouldn’t feel like sausages, but how many cheese burgers could a person eat before their insides ripped and the ground up, half cooked beef that had been packed in spilled out?

The Hamburger Hunt had been on my mind for a long time, so much so that several people turned out to be mad at not being included when the trip finally went down. But it was just a simple loop, a Golden Brown Beefy Triangle if you will that started with Louis Lunch.

Louis Lunch in New Haven, CT is a historic landmark for being the oldest operating hamburger stand in the United States, and some argue the location where the hamburger was invented. I don’t know, what do I look like a beefamatician?

What I do know is they serve a tasty burger allegedly made from five different cuts of beef, and so you don’t spoil the flavor condiments are not allowed in the consumption of this masterpiece of meat. Also they don’t give you buns, or rolls, or whatever you want to call them that usually go on the outside of any self respecting burger. Instead you get two slices of toasted white bread and you’d better be happy with that.

A short hop north to Meriden, CT lands you are in the twilight zone of burger cooking. Sometime in the early 1900′s they started cooking their burgers the way they ironed their clothes, with steam. These steamed burgers are a tradition here and Ted’s Restaurant has been serving them up since 1959. I don’t want to make a bad joke about it being the same steamer since they opened but lets just say that it will be a long time before I try another steamed hamburger.

Besides which the vertical cast iron hamburger stove at Louis Lunch is from 1898 and those burgers tasted great.

Ted’s cooks little square patties that I wished had fit the bun. Instead there was some extra roll, no doubt to catch the melted mozzarella cheese they cover the burger with and makes for a damn tasty presentation. But unlike the first burger of the day these needed a little condiment love to get them down.

The original plan then called for a nice hike to Heublein Tower in an attempt to try and burn off some of those burgers before the Rhode Island finale. Located just north of Ted’s in Talcott State Park it is a castle tower the manufacturing magnate of A1 Steak Sauce and Smirnoff Vodka built for his fiance.

It’s too humid. It’s uphill, I just went to the gym yesterday and my trainer…

“The view is awesome.”

“You go, I’ll wait here.” She says slumping back into the drivers seat of her car.

Haven Bros., the supposed end of the Golden Beef Triangle wasn’t to be either. Located in downtown Providence, RI, how the hell else was I going to complete the damn triangle?, was the original and intended ending.

“Maybe just a salad.” She says.

Haven Bros. Burger!

“Maybe I have to get home in time to watch the new Thursday line up on NBC.”

I still got them to make me a burger at the Greek place where we ate, lettuce, tomato, feta cheese and tzatziki sauce.

No Haven Bros., no Beefy Triangle, not as it was originally envisioned anyway.

My large intestines breathe a sigh of relief.

So despite my best effort I finally managed to summit Katahdin on September 8th.

Normally after summiting Katahdin and finishing up ones five month thru hike of the Appalachian Trail one would have some idea of what to do next. I mean its not like I didn’t have plenty of time to think about it.

But I suspect that like a lot of other thru hikers out there who spent so much time on the trail, living trail life day in and day out, that I simply denied the very fact that this would all somehow come to an end.

Then it happens, and a quick bus ride later I’m back in the Bucket. Pawtucket, Rhode Island that is, with no place to go and it turns out nothing much to come back to. You see I sold my car and put everything I owned in storage at my families house. My car is still sold, duh, and all those boxes have gone missing. All of my stuff, including the thumb drive with the first 1,500 pictures from my hike have disappeared into a strange sort of alternate dimension where the transition back home is a smooth and chaos free experience.

Normally I would suspect that a hiker would trade the freedom of the trail for the security of home. I just seemed to have missed out on the security part. I have actually stealth camped twice since being back, something that was unthinkable before the hike.

Things will change soon enough I’m sure, they just need a little time, a lot of work and whole hell of a lot of money.

In the meantime I’m missing the freedom.

… but enjoying the electricity.