Been doing a bit of last minute editing before starting any kind of “official” launch or promotion of A Boy Named Rabbit, and had a real surprise last night. I made some changes, saved my newly revised document, converted it to HTML, and then uploaded it to Amazon. Well, lo and behold, the little spinning wheel that lets you know your file is being converted to Kindle format by Amazon wouldn’t stop spinning. It’s a process that I’ve seldom had take longer than 3 minutes or so, but after an hour, I gave up and went away for a while. When I came back again, it was still going. Obviously, there was a problem with the file, but I could find no way to stop the process. That big wheel kept on turnin’ and I was left doing my truly fine Tina Turner impression as I headed off to bed.

When I got up this morning, I found a message alerting me that there was something wrong with my file (ya think?) and it could not be converted. They advised me to try again. After about thirty minutes of checking various things in my Word document, I realized that in shuffling around some items at the back of the book (Author’s Notes, etc), I had failed to remove a Page Break at the end of the last page. And that, my friends, was enough to throw a monkey wrench into the whole process.

If this ever happens to me again, the first thing I’ll be looking at will be the very last page. If that’s not the issue, I’ll check the page breaks at the end of every chapter, and between the other sections of the book. And I’m sharing this with you today, so you won’t panic if it  ever happens to you. Kindle does NOT play well with blank pages. A word to the wise, and a lesson learned by me.