{"id":5348,"date":"2025-03-05T14:06:54","date_gmt":"2025-03-05T21:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5348"},"modified":"2025-03-05T14:09:57","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T21:09:57","slug":"what-a-difference-four-years-makesto-kdp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5348","title":{"rendered":"What a Difference Four Years Makes…to KDP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, in a couple of days I\u2019m going to flip the switch and ask KDP to publish The Everything Machine<\/em>, my first novel since 2021\u2014if Complete Sentences<\/a><\/em> really counts as a novel, of which I\u2019m not entirely sure. I\u2019ve already uploaded both ebook and paperback editions, and I\u2019m only waiting for a final proof copy to get here. Amazon says tomorrow\u2014and it\u2019s been bang-on with delivery times for the first two proof copies I ordered across the past month or so.<\/p>\n

I knew going in that there would be some changes to KDP. Amazon has sent me half a dozen emails reminding me that as of March 18, KDP will no longer accept mobi files. Mobi has been Kindle\u2019s flagship file type probably as long as there\u2019s been Kindle.I\u2019ve seen no explanation, but after 3\/18 only kpf (Kindle Create) epub, or docx files will be accepted. This doesn\u2019t slow me down in the least. The Jutoh ebook editor<\/a> that I use can export epubs as well as anything else in current use.<\/p>\n

What surprised me more was the addition of spell-checking on uploaded ebooks. Out of the novel\u2019s 130,000 words, the spellchecker called out 30-odd items as possible misspellings. Then it was courteous enough to send me an email listing them all. Out of those 30-odd, only four were actually misspelled words. The rest were character dialect or Jeff inventions, including metarhythmic, wubbled, birdoculars, bitspace, rectored, pinlight, fancraft, fauciam (Latin) recursor, bookspring, bitbags, gatherum (without omnium in front of it) and vuldt. <\/p>\n

There are some asterisks: Although I invented the word \u201cvuldt\u201d when I was in high school, \u201cVuldt\u201d is actually a Dutch surname. It must be a very rare<\/em> surname, since none of the other surnames I used in the novel came up as misspellings. It didn\u2019t like \u201csteerskin,\u201d even though it\u2019s a reasonably common term.<\/p>\n

Weirdest of all, it didn\u2019t like the word \u201cleptal.\u201d Why? Because \u201cleptal\u201d isn\u2019t a word. At best it\u2019s the trademarked name of an antiseizure drug. But I was lead-pipe certain that \u201cleptal\u201d is the opposite of \u201cdextral,\u201d a real word meaning right-handed chirality. Alas, the real word for left-handed chirality is \u201csinistral.\u201d (Recall the two old words from heraldry for right and left: \u201cdexter\u201d and \u201csinister.\u201d ) As best I can tell, I was reaching for the word for left-handed chirality and inadvertently made up my own.<\/p>\n

The spellchecker gave me the option of ignoring any of the highlighted words, which was handy. I fixed the typos in the epub and replaced \u201cleptal\u201d with \u201cdextral,\u201d because it didn\u2019t matter which chirality I called out. The Hilbert stardrive has two chiral cables in its big ring, and which one I cited had no effect on the plot. Later, I fixed the typos in the paperback\u2019s PDF. I uploaded corrected versions of both epub and PDF.<\/p>\n

Now, we wait. Trust me, you\u2019ll see the announcement here and a lot of other places when Amazon OKs the uploads and publishes them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, in a couple of days I\u2019m going to flip the switch and ask KDP to publish The Everything Machine, my first novel since 2021\u2014if Complete Sentences really counts as a novel, of which I\u2019m not entirely sure. I\u2019ve already uploaded both ebook and paperback editions, and I\u2019m only waiting for a final proof copy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5348"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5350,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5348\/revisions\/5350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}