I discovered something very early on while I  was attempting to become knowledgable about the code that drives an e-book. Code is a hard thing to learn. There are strict rules and semantics but in the end if you are meticulous it should work exactly as it is supposed to do. See that guy there? He is agonizing over every character in a long senseless (?) string of them to get his software to work the first time and every time. He's no doubt a smart guy but still things don't always come out acting the way it said in the documentation. It's as if there is an intelligence at work among that code. You can play with it and alter layouts and somehow things change. I have had times where I did everything right and "it" refused to do what I coded. Next day as if by magic "it" decides OK I'll play nice and it works fine. Often you go back and forth adjusting a page many ties when you're struggling, creating epub file after epub file, editing, testing and so on. There are variables that effect things that you don't know about- you can't know about- you shouldn't know about.  At first I thought it was just me. I'm new, self taught (with the help of many out there, thank you all) , I must have missed something. Then I came across this image on the web the other day. Yeah, it might not be me after all! There's just something unexplainable about this stuff! But if that's the case then we're back to that artificial intelligence thing again! Is there some digital universe where this stuff lives and thinks and schemes or dreams? Hmmm  
It makes it a more interesting pursuit if things are unpredictable and fluid. There is more of a sense of magic and adventure. That has to be one of the reasons I love what I term "E-pubbin." It's also about making books which is magical too. Books can be eternal if they're preserved. If you think about it E-books don't have a physical presence so they aren't as delicate as paper and they should last until humankind has lost the ability to view digital files.  It should be so much easier to keep an e-book in circulation forever and available to anyone with a connection. No need for thermal/humidity controlled archives, white gloves and viewing rooms. You know, there is a lot to think about e-books and 'What the...?'

Amazon has come out with a simple epub tool for creating fixed layout e-books for comics and manga. People are always excited about the idea of a no learning curve app for creating e-books. I would love to see that too however that tool is not with us as yet and may not be for some time. They think making e-books must be a simple task; you just dump some content in one end, click and out pops a fully functional e-tome with all the bells and whistles. Sadly no, that's not how an e-book is made. Can you make a p-book as easily? I don't think so, so why this assumption that the computer will do it all for us? We live in the clickable society. Computers are all-powerful, photoshop is the be all end all in graphics creation. Even if that were true, why would you want to live in a world where your individual contribution is dwarfed by a mindless machine? I guess it all boils down to either being lazy or just not having enough time to do all the things we need to do to get by day to day. It's too hard to learn everything it takes to create an e-book from scratch, I can't learn this stuff, it's too techie. Well, in 2003 I basically bought my first computer to use for work. It was a little hard but I learned. In 2011 I found out I no longer had a job that I had depended on for 35 years. I wanted to self publish my own books in one way or another because I had a lot of content I could use. I took on-line courses to learn epub production and in a short time I had two e-books on the market earning me a steady income which came straight to my bank account. I wasn't some genuis, I just had the drive and motivation to learn and I did. I'm still learning all the time about new ways of making e-books, learning is a process that never ends unless you just give up and consign yourself to the fates. 


Comics Creator could be a great tool to get you started on the way to self publishing but I don't believe it is the tool you'll want for all things. R. Scot Johns has a great website for learning Kindle epub production and he has tested KC2 extensively, giving a pretty good overview of it. Wonderfully, the epub geniuses out there are not shy about sharing their knowledge about how you too can create an epub file. There are many sites and blogs detailing their studies and methods. It is truly amazing how much info is out there for the aspiring indie publisher. All you have to do is turn off the TV and get started. What could be easier? I always remember the old saying, "Not begun is never done."


You can see R. Scots blog entry on KC2 here:    
http://authoradventures.blogspot.com/2013/04/kindle-comic-creator-analysis.html

Well dear e-readers, circumstances have conspired to defeat our plans for an April upload for George Trosley's How To Draw CARtoon Cars 
e-dition. The e-book is nearly finished, just some final code work to stylize the appearance and assure it displays correctly on a device. Much testing and validating along the way but then you get that lovely little window that says...  

... and your book is fini. It is now (officially when you upload it to a seller or aggregator and it goes live across the webiverse) eternal (or at least as long as there is an internet or a device to read it) and it will be available (never does an e-book get pulled off the shelf) to future generations of plugged in people. But with the right book it can also be a little golden egg laid on your desktop bringing you income in monthly sales, the sky being the limit!
Now back to work e-slave! The Troz awaits!!