AMAZON AND KINDLE PUBLISHING FILES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Farewell, People's Republic of China. We hardly knew ye.

*

I'm not talking about the People's Republic of China. But I often thought of China when I created PRC files for Kindle books.

*

Amazon no longer supports the PRC file it pimped out to me at every fucking opporchancity. Write your story. Edit your story. Publish your story - by converting it to PRC.
   And don't forget to drop two important pieces of metadata in there before hitting the BUILD button. Fare thee well, BUILD button. Your like, we shall not press again.
   I won't speak of the arcane process involving the Table of Contents and its Frankensteinian creation. There was a ceremony for this, and...

*

My legs! Argh!
   Don't think that knee will ever be the same. It hurts on rainy days.
   Anyway, I didn't use the arcane ceremony - for the simple reason that I couldn't get the fucker to work at the last gasp.
   Instead, I used the outré method of dropping two lines of code into the PRC file's metadata - forcing Amazon's Kindle system to see my Table of Contents and, good gravy, nod in the general direction of the start of each book.
   What fresh hell is this?
   I believe a lot of writers uttered that phrase to themselves as they went through this non-process.

*

And it's all gone. Amazon shifted over to MOBI files. I didn't shift over with them. Instead, I opted to test the basic Microsoft Word file.
   No fucking around with software, metadata, no remembering codes, no fucking nothing. Write your story. Edit your story. Publish your story.
   Done. Melissa C. Water, mentioned elsewhere on the blog, wanted to put out some of her stories. I offered to format the books, using basic Word files, to see how things looked.
   After uncovering one invisible glitch, I saw that the system took the strain. Farewell, PRC. I'll miss you like rabies. Well. Damn.

*

I don't deny, I learned a lot when I put those files together. They were great for testing. But Amazon keeps advancing its Kindle products, and who am I to stand in the way of Darth Bezos?
   Besides, provided my book is formatted to within an inch of its life, just using the Word file takes away an awkward moment or two of coding shit that I need never remember again.
   And the world is a better place for that.