It took a month-plus, but Lords of Kobol - Collection: Special Edition is now available for download from multiple retailers. The links are below; a needlessly detailed recounting of what happened immediately follows.
So LoK SE was published on Smashwords on Dec. 8. Smashwords is the free site through which I publish my books. Because I can't charge for my BSG-related work and Smashwords lets me make books free to download, it makes sense. And, Smashwords has what they call the "premium catalog," which means they distribute it to other online retailers (Apple, B&N, etc. ... not Amazon; they won't let me charge $0.00) Typically, it takes about four-ish days for a book to be uploaded and then get distributed elsewhere.
Not this time.
When I publish through Smashwords, I upload a Microsoft Word "doc" file which then gets converted into everything else. LoK SE is a large book with a LARGE amount of hyperlinking inside. The Word file is 1,314 pages long and 13.8 MB. There are over 400 chapters, plus commentary on about 85% of those chapters. Fifty images. It's big. The problem, as it turns out, was the table of contents. Not the one I made; the one that was automatically generated.
If you've read the book, you know there's a table of contents that links to all the chapters, the maps, etc. At the end of most chapters, there's a link to the author's commentary on that chapter. Each of these links require two things: a bookmark and a hyperlink. For example, for chapter one of Book One, I select the heading for that chapter, click "insert bookmark," and give it a name ("I1" - for Book One, chapter one). Then, in the table of contents, I highlight "I - PYTHIA," click "insert link," select "place in this document," and then the "I1" bookmark. So I had to insert bookmarks and hyperlinks for all 420-ish chapters, plus the maps, prefaces, the acknowledgements at the end, the list of other books, etc. That's 430 pairs of bookmarks and links. This doesn't include the commentary. I'm guesstimating that there are about 350 "author's commentary" sections, which means that's another 350 pairs of bookmarks and links. Because the automatically generated table of contents looks for these bookmarks, that's a whole mess of stuff that could end up in the ToC that shouldn't be there.
(This does not include the "hidden bookmarks" that Word creates for some godsdamned reason every time you open the file, make a change, or look at the screen funny. By the time I was ready to upload the finished doc file, there were literally thousands of these bastards. I had to create a macro in Word to delete them all because doing so by hand would have been impossible.)
So, when I uploaded the LoK SE doc file, the system struggled to reconcile the ToC as I had it (just the chapters, maps, etc.) against the massive number of other bookmarks not in that ToC. The epub file generated by Smashwords, when downloaded and its ToC opened, included scores of oddball links at the end, plus missing legitimate links.
After conversation with Smashwords support (shoutout to Matt T.), I learned that there is a special way to create bookmarks you don't want in that auto-generated ToC. Prefixing a bookmark with "ref_" means the auto-generator will ignore it and it won't end up in the epub's ToC. That means every "author's commentary" bookmark would need to be edited to add "ref_" at the start and every link pointing to those bookmarks would need to be redone, too.
Needless to say, this took a while.*
Reupload. Better, but still had bad, "stray" links in the ToC and missing links, too. Edited and reuploaded again. No change.
At this point, I decided to the back-and-forth navigation was just too complex. Support said a well-crafted epub file would likely be the solution (and Smashwords allows those uploads, too). I started down that path with the program Calibre. Days later, the epub file was finished and I uploaded it. I downloaded the epub from Smashwords and it looked OK ... but would it pass review and get in the premium catalog? Nearly a week later, the answer was "yes."
TL;DR: here are the links:
Smashwords (in all file formats)
Apple
Barnes & Noble
Everand
Gardners
Kobo
Odilo
Please, download the book from your online service of choice. But, most importantly, be sure you give it a rating and leave reviews wherever you can. This helps spread the word and get more readers on board. I really appreciate it and hope you enjoy it.
* - Holy shit. Colonies of Kobol - Special Edition is going to take forever. That's well over 500 chapters and author's commentary sections. It'll take weeks to get it in shape, but at least I knew I would be starting with an epub file thanks to the 15MB Wall. I better get started now if I want it to be ready to go for March 15.
Thanks for reading.
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