Well, it took a couple of months, but the commentary for Colonies of Kobol is complete. The whole thing is 2,631 pages in Word with about 400 being the added commentary. That's a lot of pics, show connections, linguistic discussions, and so on. A lot.
You may recall a previous blog post wherein I was worried about the file size. Well, yeah. That's still a concern. (Warning: lots of talk about how the sausage is made follows.)
Smashwords, the ebook publishing site I use, has a limit of 15MB when it comes to uploading .doc files. The final version of CoK SE (with low-quality images) is 20.1MB. So that's out. However, they also allow uploading epub files and the limit on those is 20MB.
I've experimented with this and here's how it went. Calibre can make epub files from .docx files, so I converted the book from .doc to .docx and then ran it through Calibre. I don't know what black magic it utilizes, but the final epub file was only 5.9MB. Seeing that, I decided to create a version of the book with high-quality images. Well, that .doc file was 33MB, but after converting it to an epub, it was 18.7MB. Huzzah!
But there's a problem. Smashwords apparently employs rigorous standards for the epubs they allow to be published and their site specifically mentioned Calibre (and other programs) as often providing files that get rejected. They run the epubs through EPUBCHECK, which is apparently a standard for those files agreed upon by some sort of international cabal. I downloaded a program that allows me to check the files myself and, expecting the worst, I went ahead and ran CoK SE through. To my unending surprise, it got a green check mark and "OK."
I mean, my formatting isn't crazy because Smashwords also has rigorous criteria for their .doc uploads. I assumed with all of my footnotes and links to and fro in 90%+ chapters, it would throw off something. But it didn't.
I'm cautiously optimistic for next March when CoK SE will be published. My plan is to upload the epub to Smashwords and see what happens. If it ends up getting rejected, I'll have a contingency standing by, perhaps the barebones "no commentary" version that barely fit under 15MB but includes links to my Google Drive with the full version.
So there you go. I'll let both LoK SE and CoK SE sit and marinate for a bit. Then, in the fall, I'll give the commentaries another pass and be ready to publish the first one in December. As planned.
Thanks for reading.
