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…
ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA 