So The Big Aha is selling and getting out there. Nice post on it by Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing.

I’ve been working with publishing ebooks and paperback POD (print on demand) books for nearly two years now. It’s been a long learning process, and I’m nowhere near done. Like hacking my way through a jungle with a machete.

Generally, the best way to get an answer to a question is to Google search with the main words of your question and look through the links that you find. The official help files for given software products aren’t always the best sources of info.

As a public service I thought I’d make the following links available. I’ve grouped them into two sections: Epublishing and POD Publishing. I like to keep my links alphabetized, so I’ve prefixed the titles of my most-used links with “AAA.”

Last updated November 19, 2013. Permanent version of this post is online at
www.rudyrucker.com/pdf/ebook_pod_bookmarks.html

The categories listed include:
Calibre (free program for converting between EPUB, HTML, and MOBI)
Dreamweaver (Adobe program for working with HTML files)
Lulu, NOOK, and KDP (ebook distributors)
CreateSpace and Lightning (POD book distributors)
ID (InDesign, Adobe program for designing print books)
There ought to be some links for Sigil (free program for creating EPUB files), but there aren’t.

Some of my early musings on Ebooks can be found in my ebook, How To Make An Ebook. See also my series of blog posts on the same topic. I’m so worn out from making my The Big Aha, that I don’t have the energy to write a How To Make A POD Book. So for now this list of links must suffice.

Have fun. If you can call this kind of thing fun…

—Rudy

Epublishing

AAA E-junkie (Sellers) – Admin

AAA ISBN My Identifiers | Bowker | Identifier Services

AAA KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): Bookshelf

AAA Lulu

AAA NOOK Press

Adobe – Digital Editions

BARNES & NOBLE | Rudy Rucker

Calibre User Manual

Dreamweaver Troubleshooting links

ebook how to – CNET Reviews

Ebook Conversion — calibre User Manual

Ebook convert straight quotes to curly quotes

eBook Formatting Paul Salvette in Bangkok:

Ebook, making your text Kindle-Friendly

Ebook: EPUB, MOBI, AZW and PDF Formats

Ebook: Fonts used in various eReaders?

Ebook: Fonts, CSS Font Stack

EPUB A Basic Sigil Tutorial

EPUB adding to iBooks via ITunes

Epub avoid split into several html files? – MobileRead Forums

Epub Format Construction Guide – HXA7241 – 2007

EPUB Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0.1 v1.0

EPUB Overview — Sigil v0.4.1 documentation

ePub putting on Your iPad

Epub Reader For Windows 7

EPUB Reader Windows Software

EPUB Sigil Splitting Pages

EPUB tables MobileRead

EPUB to MOBI Conversion [Left Margin Problem] « Morning Cup O’ Joe

Font Size and Color — Support — WordPress.com

HTML – image as large as possible

HTML Anchor Bookmark Tag Links

HTML CSS Cheatsheet

HTML Fix Dreamweaver problem with large DOC import

HTML for the Kindle with Blockquote

HTML for the Kindle with Blockquote

HTML into ebook Sample Code

HTML online preview TryIt Editor

HTML td tag

ISBN buy and use at MyIdentifiers.com

Kindle Cover Size

Kindle eBook how to| Amazon Kindle 3 and Kindle DX Review and News Blog

Kindle from PDF

Kindle Guide Flags in a MOBI. “Start”

Kindle OPF, Guide

kindle-guide.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Lulu Book Distribution

PDFs splitting into multiple documents

Piracy Alert (Scribd)

POD Publishing

AAA Lightning Source Log In

AAA Log In – CreateSpace

AAA Login ISDN on Bowker

Amazon Author Central

Color Acrobat 9: Output Preview and Conversion « Layers Magazine

Color. ID PDF, Pantone colours look dull in Acrobat Professional

Color: AdobeRGB, sRGB or what?

Color: Work Process for Best Colors…

CreateSpace Bleed on Cover Template

CreateSpace Book Cost Calculator

CreateSpace Community: Creating a PDF for Print

CreateSpace Gutter Margin

CreateSpace Margins

CreateSpace Post Editorial Reviews on Amazon

CreateSpace Pre Order sales

Createspace vs. Lightning Source Costs

Createspace., Craddock’s Be Not Content

CreateSpace: Cover Template

CreateSpace: Self Publishing and Free Distribution for Books, CD, DVD

CS Entering addresses to ship to customers?

Dreamweaver: “Clean Up Word HTML” Error

htaccess file for limiting access to a directory

ID Anchor A Graphics Frame

ID Baseline Grid

ID Chapter names in header

ID crashes at startup

ID Creating book files

ID EPUB CS6 Export as EPUB

ID EPUB Exporting EPUB

ID Export to HTML

ID Fix Italic Overrides

ID Flow: Adding Text with Flow

ID Flow: Why is Smart Text Reflow so hard?

ID Headers

ID Highlight Overrides Script

ID How to Anchor Objects InDesign (not very helpful)

ID Import Graphics

ID Import Styles

ID Import Word file

ID Improve justified type settings

ID insert page spreads–Allow Pages To Shuffle

ID Justification

ID Keep Words Together with No Break

ID Keyboard shortcuts

ID Laying out frames and pages

ID Making a Book file (video)

ID Margin Sizes

ID Margins and Columns

ID Master pages

ID optical margin

ID Optical Margin

ID Page Numbering Tricks

ID Place graphics in a graphics frame
ID Print/Don’t Print Frame Outline

ID Remove Defaults and Saved Data

ID Running Header Text Variables Chap Title

ID save as Ebook

ID Suggested Layout Tips

ID Table Of Contents

ID Tabs and indents

ID Thread and Flow Text

ID Unlink a text file (the hard way)

ID Use Odd Page Break between Chaps

ID Why ugly <span> tags in EPUB Export? Local overrides.

ID Working with graphics frames

ID Working with Word and InDesign

Image Word Resize Image Macro

InDesign Page numbering

Indie Author: Lulu vs. CreateSpace: Which Is More Economical For The DIY Author?

Lightning Color Shephard New 2013

Lightning / CreateSpace Pricing: Shepard Plan B (old)

Lightning / CreateSpace Pricing: Shepard Plan C (new)

Lightning B&W pricings

Lightning Book Cost Calculator

LIghtning Color prices

Lightning cover template

Lightning Creation Guide

Lightning Source 101 (Lightning Source Inc., print on demand, self publishing companies)

Lightning Standard vs Premium Color

MONKEYBRAINS – Support – Basic Auth

Proof Better-Looking Full Justification for Paragraphs in WORD

Proof Remove dupicate words in WORD

PS Em dash and en dash in Photoshop text — Photoshop for Windows — ClearPS.com

PS Fixed size selection

Reviews (Booklist Online)

Reviews (Library Journal)

Reviews (Publisher’s Weekly)

Rudy’s Blog Making a High-Quality Picture Book

Word: Removing Unused Styles

“Woman With Jellyfish,” oil on canvas, November, 2013, 24” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting. [I revised this painting on December 19, 2013, and the new version is shown here.]

I’d gone to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with my wife, and we’d looked a big tank of sea nettle jellyfish. I made a little photo of my wife by the tank, and at first I wanted to paint that. But in the end, the woman in the painting didn’t look at all like my wife, and the painting’s viewpoint suggests that either we’re looking out from inside the tank at the woman, or maybe the jellyfish are floating around in the air instead of being inside a tank. Once I realized the woman wasn’t going to be a portrait of my wife I gave her green hair and made her look kind of cantankerous and space-punk. Maybe she’s “talking” with that big jellyfish.

Possibly she’ll turn up in a story or novel that I write in the coming year…now that I’m done with The Big Aha.

“Eyes,” oil on canvas, October, 2013, 20” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This was an easy painting to make—I just did a lot of eyes. I didn’t particularly try to make them scary. I was more interested in them looking alert. I had fun with the colors, getting all the shades to be fairly even intensities of mild pastel colors. I think I might do a painting of “Snouts” next, with pig-snout disks.

As always you can find more info on my paintings at my Paintings page.

The Big Aha
A Novel by Rudy Rucker
From Transreal Books. Paperback and Ebook. (Hardback coming soon.)
330 pages and 14 illustrations.
***
Biotech has replaced machines.
Qrude artist Zad Plant works with living paint.
Career’s on the skids, wife Jane threw him out.
Enter qwet—it’s quantum wetware!
Qwet makes you high, and gives you telepathy.
A loofy psychedelic revolution begins.
Oh-oh! Mouths in midair, eating people!
Zad and Jane travel through a wormhole—and meet the aliens.
Stranger than you ever imagined.
What is the Big Aha?
***
Browse the entire The Big Aha novel for free as an illustrated web page.
Buy ebook and print editions of The Big Aha.
More info at the website for The Big Aha.
And one more thing: Notes for The Big Aha , a book-length writing journal.

Click for a larger version of The Big Aha cover flat.

My new novel The Big Aha will be going live quite soon. Available in paperback and ebook via Transreal Books.

By way of building towards the official release, I’m gong to post some background material. Here’s excerpts of an interview taped by Liza Groen Trombi for Locus magazine in May, 2013. The complete interview appeared in the June, 2013, issue, and I recently added it to my “All the Interviews” document online.

I also made a podcast of my tape of the interview. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

So, okay, the rest of today’s post is me talking to Liza about The Big Aha in May, 2013, when I was about 85% done with writing the novel. I’ll put in some images of my paintings that I used as chapter illustrations for final version The Big Aha.

The Big Aha is set in Louisville, Kentucky, where I grew up, and I’m enjoying that. If you stay in Louisville, then all the people around you are people you’ve known your whole life, and you can pretty much say anything to them. Nobody cares. I’ve been visiting Louisville lately, and it’s strange.

I enjoy writing books about genomics and the biotech revolution. I think that’s going to be one of the really big technologies of the 21st century. We’re still just barely wading into that. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that in a century or so, lots of our devices won’t be manufactured machines anymore. They could be plants and animals that have been designed to behave in ways that we consider useful. Even things like a knife or a glass, it’s easy enough to imagine plants growing such things for us. Primitive peoples drink out of coconut shells, but we could tweak it so it’s more what we like. And for communication devices, there’s all this interest in squid skin—that would be a great visual display. Electric eels send out electromagnetic pulses, so that could be the basis of wireless communication.

I wrote a book a few years ago called Frek and the Elixir, set in 3003, where everything was biotech. I wanted to come back to a world like that. In The Big Aha , I wanted to have a book where the technology is based on living things. It’s not set too far into the future, more like 2100.

I was born in 1946, so the Summer of Love was the year I graduated from college. I really liked that period. It was over so quickly. It was getting really good, and suddenly it was over. I wanted to have a story where something like that was happening, but I didn’t want it to be based on drugs. By now everyone has ossified opinions about drugs, they’re for them or they’re against them. It sort of closes the imagination.

I wanted to have something to give people a cosmic experience. I thought, “I’ll use quantum mechanics.” As a science fiction writer, there are various nebulous “bogosity-generator” tools I can use. Something about quantum mechanics that interests me is there are two modes in quantum mechanics. You can think of the world as evolving in a smooth wavelike pattern, but then as soon as you start measuring things, you find a choppy discrete pattern. It’s what they call the quantum collapse, the collapse of the wave function.

In my own mind, I feel like there’s a pulse, where I’ll sort of merge into the place around me and then snap back. Say it’s a nice day, and you’re not really verbalizing to yourself, you’re not really forming opinions in your mind, you’re not doing anything consciously. And then you snap back and you think, “There’s so-and-so, I have to ask them for something; it’s such-and-such o’clock, I have to get in the car and go somewhere.” There are two modes, and I call them the cosmic mode and the robotic mode. It’s almost like sonar—you ping out with the cosmic mode and you pull back with the robotic mode.

The gimmick in The Big Aha is that people get quantum wetware. “Wetware” is already an intriguing word—it’s what’s going on in your body, your DNA, your chemicals. And then make it quantum, so you can consciously control how rapidly you do the oscillations between the cosmic mode and robotic mode. So my characters are party people, they just wedge their minds open to the cosmic, and they’re cosmic all the time. It’s like they’re acidheads, but they’re not taking any drugs. And they can teep each other. And instead of mechanical technology it’s all biological, so instead of a car you have a road spider, and you ride on its back. The animals you create can have quantum wetware as well. You can get in the vibe with them, and make them change their form. And so the world becomes more spacey.

Then, of course, you always need something bad to happen in a novel. It’s always good to have an alien invasion. So there are these things like mouths sticking into our world from another dimension, and they’re eating people. I call it The Big Aha because people always have the dream of getting a Big Aha experience! The big vision beyond the white light. My characters are seeking that. There’s also the Zen idea: “I was looking for enlightenment but it was here all along.” Just for a moment, you feel it—the big aha.

At this point [that is, in May, 2013] I’m not sure who’s going to publish The Big Aha . I’m unsure about my chances with publishers. And I’m starting to wonder if they’re worth the months or even years of waiting, and the begging for such meager pay.

I’m putting a little more sex into The Big Aha than I used to do for my Tor books. David Hartwell once said to me, “If you’re talking about the 13-year-old audience, there are some 13-year-olds who are very interested in sex, and some who aren’t. And you can guess which group is the one that reads science fiction.”

Not that The Big Aha is mainly about sex. But maybe it’s hard for me to judge what’s acceptable. Like I’ve been out there so long that I don’t even know what’s supposed to be normal. In any case I’m having a lot of fun with the book.

I like using the classic tropes of SF—I call them the “power chords.” That’s how I thought of cyberpunk, as a way of taking the classic SF things, like alien invasions, telepathy, giant ants, and making them rock a little harder. That’s what I’m doing in The Big Aha.

I’m confident I can publish The Big Aha with Transreal Books. Maybe I’ll do a Kickstarter. We’ll see how it goes. [End of interview material.]

And it went good! The release is soon!