Any questions? Just ask.

It has been quite some time since I last posted. 

Thanks to everyone who has read my small book of Japanese stories.  I've gotten some good comments although only one rating.  I hope more people will be able to find the book.  I would enjoy hearing everyone's comments.

If you would like, please become my friend on Facebook and let me know you are a reader.  I'm listed under my name, Richard Nigh, and I'm the one from Saipan and have a peace sign with Japanese words written across it as my avatar. 

The thing I like about the book is that it takes stories, some of which are really incomprehensible to non-Japanese, and makes them understandable.  It really was hard to stay away from religion, gods, miracles and the like, but I think I did as well as can be expected.  I was able to keep violence down to a minimum, and I think it is really one of the best books for introducing Japanese stories available.  If you haven't decided to read it, it is still very inexpensive. 

Thanks for your interest.  I will try to write more about the choosing of the stories and the difficulty in finding suitable stories in later posts -- when I am not so busy as I've been lately.  Any questions?  Just ask.

Richard

SUCCESS UPLOADING!

Now, I really have uploaded the book in a format that works.  I've tried it on Apple iBooks, Barnes & Nobles Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, Books on Board, Marvin, and Kindle.  All except the Kindle were uploaded to Smashwords, which does make a Kindle version but doesn't send the book to Kindle.  It's an option to buy on Smashwords, but it doesn't work as well as the actual Kindle version.  All the other versions it made for programs that use the .epub format worked well.  The contents link to the pictures before the chapters, and the centering of the images and text works now.

Some of the centering problem was actually because of the programs themselves.  Nook, for instance, has an option to use the publisher's formatting or Nook's.  If you set it to Nook's formatting, Lmost all of the centering is lost.  On publisher's formatting, everything looks perfect.

I really like Apple's iBook because you can set it to look like a book.  The pages turn like a book, and it looks really good to me.

Sometime, I'll write a comparison of the different ebook readers I have, and maybe I'll try to get a few more in the meantime.

Anyway, I succeeded.  My next book should be much easier to format!  For now, I have to go do some bushcuttering and then pay some bills and then...

Thought I did it, but...

Creating an ebook that will work well on all platforms -- which is what Smashwords is for -- isn't extremely difficult, but...

The book looks great on iBooks.  The Smashwords edition for Kindle is okay but not great.  And parts of the book lost their centering on Nook and Kobo.  So, I am reformatting and rebookmarking pages to see if I can solve the problem. 

I uploaded my Kindle edition (to Amazon), and it looked really good when I tried it out.  So I just published it.  It's supposed to show up in the Kindle catalog in about 12 hours.

Did It! (I think.)

I finished uploading The Greedy Babyman and other Fun Japanese Tales.  This upload is my Smashwords version, which sends it to a number of different ebook sellers. This week, I'll publish it to the Amazon Kindle.

It was a good first try.  I downloaded an html file of it that worked well.  Then I downloaded a .mobi version that worked well on the Kindle.  The illustrations look very nice. 

I'll have to wait to try others because my OS is too old to get the software I need to try it out on other venues.  Hmm.  Although there might be a way.

There may be a bit of tweaking I'll need to do later, but so far so good.  I read and reread instructions for formatting, and I pretty much got it right.  When creating an ebook, you can't use spaces or tabs for indents, and page breaks don't always work well.  Making a table of contents wasn't nearly as difficult as it appeared at first.  From what I read, inserting pictures can be a nightmare, but the ten watercolors I added and the glyphs all worked perfectly.

Ha!

The Greedy Babyman

My first post.

I'm publishing The Greedy Babyman (and other Japanese Tales) soon on a host of platforms.  Sony, Barnes & Nobles, Amazon Kindle, and others.

When I was learning Japanese, I used to read scores of Japanese folk tales and tell them to my kids.  A lot of the folk tales I read were about revenge.  There's the popular story about the crab and the monkey, for instance.  The monkey steals the crab's persimmons, but the crab gets the last laugh when he gets his friends to beat some sense into the monkey.  Not the kinds of stories I wanted to tell my kids.

But there were some stories I liked -- and that my kids liked.  Those are the ones I put into this small book.  Stories that could be understood by the minds of scrutable Occidentals.  The characters are often amusing: a man who gets greedy at the fountain of youth, a snail who beats a raccoon at a race, two old people who decide that the first one who says a word loses the mochi, a man who dresses up to give a fire alarm, and many more.

Like I said, I think this book is different than most.  It's not just a collection of many stories but a collection of stories that Japanese and non-Japanese alike can appreciate.  I'll post again as soon as the book is published.

My next book, a full-length novel called, Goodman Badman, will also be coming out shortly.  Some time this year.  I'll tell you more about it later.  Another publication that's already been published but I consider a draft is Students with Major Depression Neglected in CNMI.  I'll polish it up a bit and put it up for free.  Amazing  how depression and other mental illnesses are completely ignored not just in the CNMI but in the States as well.

That's all for now.  No one knows where this blog is yet anyway.