Scrivener webinar at Mark Dawson’s Self Publishing University

I’m giving a Scrivener webinar for Mark Dawson’s Self Publishing Formula University (SPFU) on Wednesday, May 15^th. You can join the fun for just $1 US by signing up to Mark’s Patreon account at the $1/week level (no long-term commitment required).

Patreon supporters get membership of SPFU (with five quality webinars so far in the library), exclusive contents, a shoutout on the podcast, and depending on level, an SPF pin, all PDFs and handouts mentioned in podcasts, and chances to win access to premium courses.

If you’re not familiar with Mark Dawson, he’s the man behind the popular Self Publishing Show podcast, and the author of bestselling thrillers, who generously gives of his time and knowledge to help indie authors succeed. In fact, his series on Amazon ads a couple of years ago gave me the confidence I needed to wade into advertising my books.

I hope you’ll join me for the webinar! Also, look for me on an upcoming episode of the Self Publishing Show.

If you have any questions, just leave a comment below.

See you there!

Laurel Mae Hislop

10 / May / 2019

2 Comments

Laurel Mae Hislop

10 / May / 2019

Hi Gwen,

I have taken your Scrivener compiling course—very awesome. Thank you for building it. For the past two weeks, I’ve been attempting to update a book on Amazon and decided to share something I wasn’t aware of. You may know this already, but the issue took me down a rabbit hole so far I almost hit heat.

I thought the update would be simple. The book was published in 2014, and it was easy then. While going through your course I’d downloaded the Kindle Gen. I opened the ePub file from Scrivener in it and it looked perfect. Then, I took that same file and exported it to my Files to open it on my iPad—one further check. When I exported the file, a pop-up appeared telling me that the exported file did not support enhanced typesetting. Viewed on the iPad—my indentations had all disappeared.

After searching the Amazon website and not getting a clear picture of what had gone wrong, I sent them an email and contacted Scrivener support too, to see if they might have some idea of what was wrong. Oliver at Scrivener support was awesome. He replied to me directly and set out to look into the issue. Amazon sent a nonsensical auto-reply message which referred me to a phone number that turned out to be support for Prime TV. I spent an inordinate amount of time on hold with Amazon and KDP — transferred around to several departments.

The upshot—it was Oliver from Scrivener who explained it. I never got this explanation from KDP. In a nutshell—there’s no point in previewing your book on an iPad (or other device) prior to publishing. Oliver told me that Amazon builds the correct file type out of the source book (from Kindle Gen) at the server level, and they only send readers the copy that works for their device.

Anyway, sorry to be verbose, but I thought you might share this around, in case others experience the same issue.

Cheers,
Laurel Mae Hislop
- Gwen Hernandez
  
  12 / May / 2019
  
  Thanks, Laurel Mae! I’m glad you found the course helpful and I appreciate you letting me know about this. I recently learned that Amazon is no longer making kindlegen available for download. They want you to upload an EPUB (which I’ve been doing the last couple of years without issue), or use a DOCX with their new Kindle Create program.
  
  For now, if you really want to create a mobi, Scrivener is going to work around this in the next update for version 3 by looking for kindlegen in the Kindle Previewer app if you have it downloaded. Thanks!