On Jabez, a New Ebook, and Offended Sensibilities

It appears that before long, I will be releasing the third ebook under my little cottage-industry imprint, Homing Pigeon Publishing. That title will be Jabez: A Novel. 

Funny thing about this book: I wrote it at the suggestion--actually, more like the urging--of my publisher at the time, which also happened to be the publisher for the wildly successful Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson. Bruce's book has been lauded and panned, usually based on the lauder's enthusiasm for the perceived blessings generated by Wilkinson's proposed program of praying the brief prayer (found in 1 Chronicles 4:10) regularly, or else the panner's dim view of the mechanistic, genie-in-a-bottle theology some have perceived as the book's main teaching. Along the way, it sold over nine million copies worldwide, spawning its own industry, complete with a generous supply of derivative products.

The thing is, I don't hold with the so-called prosperity gospel. Whether my publisher realized it or not, I had no intention of writing a novel about Jabez that preached such a doctrine. And honestly, when you're writing a novel--even a really short one, like this--on a person in the Bible about whom there are precisely 2 verses containing 63 words, it doesn't take Einstein to figure out that you're 
going to be supplying some extra material. In other words, it was pretty much up to me, the storyteller, to decide about Jabez's personality, his life story, his theology, his relationships ... everything that makes him a fully realized character.

"The opposite of faith is not doubt--it's self-satisfaction."

So, I wrote the little novel, and it did pretty well ... admittedly, largely on the heels of Pastor Wilkinson's publishing phenomenon. But the folks referenced above who lauded said phenomenon--the handful of them who read my story--didn't take too kindly to my portrayal of the main character.

You see, I decided that my Jabez would be a person who had really experienced pain--a lot of it. He

would be a person who had heard things about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but only second- or third-hand (which, during the periods of religious apostasy spoken of in the Old Testament book of Judges, seems a likely scenario). He would be a person who came to the kind of faith needed to pray his famous prayer, but gradually, haltingly, and not without relapses into doubt such as even the most sincere believers still experience (see, for example, the painful, honest revelations in the diaries of Mother Teresa, published after her death).

I even got a copy of the book that was returned to the publisher after the purchaser had scrawled things on it: "Fake, like Hollywood!" "Coward!" "What a despicable way to make $$$ from Pastor Wilkinson's true book!" and the like. Apparently, this individual felt pretty strongly that I had profaned the Holy with my novel. I keep that copy on my shelf to remind me that not everyone will admire something I've written--even those few who actually notice it.

Be that as it may, I have elected not to tone down or change the narrative in my novel. I happen to believe that the opposite of faith is not doubt--it's self-satisfaction. So, look out, world: here comes Jabez--again.

The e-Book Chronicles, Part V

Well, creating my Epub file using the converter at Lulu.com proved to be a bit of an adventure ... of the trial-and-error type. Fortunately, they provide a fairly thorough guide (click on the "download the guide" button) that does a decent job of walking you through the process.

The first thing you have to know about is using Microsoft Word styles, because that's how Lulu's conversion software knows where your book title, chapter titles, and any subheadings are. It uses them to build the .ncx file, which is the digital table of contents for your Epub file. Your book won't be accepted by any of the online retailers if it doesn't have a properly working .ncx file, so this is important information to have. Here again, the Lulu guide explains this pretty well, and even includes screen shots from your desktop--well, if you're using  a Windows machine, that is--to ease you through the process.

So far, so good. The next thing you've got to do is to take out all the extra hard returns that you probably put into your document in order to get the various title elements to show up on the page looking cute. Unfortunately, these elements are going to display differently to readers, depending on which device they're using to read your book. So, in the name of functionality, you may very well lose some of the "pretty" you worked so hard to put into your document. In the case of my novel, it wasn't too big an issue, since it's all text with very few overt design elements. I had to tinker with this a bit, taking Lulu's suggestion of using

line breaks (shift + enter) instead of hard returns to situate title elements on the page. Once I got the hang of that, I was able to mostly get things to show up where I intended.

Then, the cover art ... Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of the previous publisher's cool cover art and adapt it for my new e-book. I downloaded a nifty free graphic design program called Gimp and, after ascending partway on the learning curve, was able to pull elements from the original cover, add some new touches, and come up with something that is both functional and attractive, I think. It worked well enough that I was inspired to make a small donation to Gimp.

I do have to say that I found certain aspects of Lulu's conversion and publishing wizard to be non-intuitive. The hardest thing for me, for example, was convincing the wizard that I really and truly didn't want to use any of Lulu's prefab cover art, and that I really and truly did want to upload the cover image that I'd created myself, thankyouverymuch. But after some tinkering and a few imprecations muttered under my breath,
I was able to get the image uploaded successfully. Important note: If you generate your own cover art for an ebook, it needs to be at a 72 ppi (pixels per inch) resolution in order to display optimally on digital devices.

So ... there you have it! I've taken you through the process, pretty much start to finish. Except ...

... Oh yeah ... selling the thing. In other words, we're just now getting to the whole reason I did this in the first place. One of the things I like about Lulu is that they submit properly formatted titles to major online retailers. At this moment, they're in the process of submitting Jeremiah: He Who Wept to the iBookstore (Apple) and Nook (Barnes & Noble). Also, since I assigned my own ISBN to the book (see "The e-Book Chronicles, Part IV"), I'm planning to download my fully functional Epub file and submit it to the Kindle Store and Google Play Books.

But that is slightly in the future. For now, I'm pleased to have gotten this far and to actually have a working product for sale. Now, all I've got to do is persuade a few people to drop $2.99 for the download... Say ... could I interest you in a really cool new e-book?

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