CREATESPACE’S “FAUX-PAR” – OR IS IT “FOE-PAR” ?!

A brief cautionary post for those thinking of using the CreateSpace self-publishing platform…

As previous visitors to this blog will know I am in the process of self-publishing my new (and first) novel  (ARK -Tragedy, Travesty, Tapas and the Ark of God) using CreateSpace. I’ve already discussed all the advantages of this service in an earlier post – and there are many advantages – but I just want to take a moment here to share with you some of the amusing grammatical mutations that occurred during the file conversion process of my manuscript.

The problem seems to be that CreateSpace’s text-conversion software can’t read some foreign expressions and phrases. Examples include:

Firstly, “au contraire” which emerges as “oh! Contraire!“;

Secondly,  “per se” which at first attempt emerged as “per say” and then, following another attempt, and to my utter bafflement, then mutated further into “per setrembe” (???);

And finally (and appropriately in a way) there was “faux-pas” which transformed into “faux-par” and then into “foe-par“- leaving me feeling well below…par!

As I said; all most amusing, at first. But the numerous attempts to download and re-upload the corrected file became increasingly infuriating. More puzzling still, was the fact that this was not a problem when uploading the text to Kindle. Different, multilingual software I presume?

The lesson here is, that it might be wise to think twice before putting too many of those pesky, highfalutin’ foreign expressions into one’s text if planning on using CreateSpace…