Authors Electric

As a dedicated procrastinator, there are lots of things I keep putting off doing. They range from making an appointment with the dentist, to swapping some theatre tickets from one date to another, to writing up the minutes for the Annual General Meeting of the local organisation of which I am currently secretary. I suppose the road to my personal hell, if I believed in it, would definitely be paved with intentions, not all of them good, although from my point of view not exactly evil either. I realised when I thought about this that I use a variety of excuses to put off doing things, but they tend to fall into two main categories. There are things I don't really want to do at all, like going to the dentist, and things I think don't have time for, such as writing up the minutes. Writing up my family history research, which is very much on my mind at present following a real-world meeting with a distant relative from Utah, is an odd one as I think I really want to do this, but...

Self publishing for the Kindle is easy – you just follow the instructions in Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing guide and let the Mobi Pocket Creator do the work for you. Trouble is, if you download the Amazon Kindle previewer and test your ebook on it you'll find that clicking one of the buttons gives the worrying result: Missing NCX file Judging by many of the ebooks I read, not all publishers and indie authors realise what this is or that their book would be better if it had one. NCX stands for Navigational Control for XML application and the NCX file creates the little marks called 'nav points' that you sometimes see on the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. If they are there, you can skip backwards and forwards along the bar between nav points using the 5 way controller. Without them, readers can only navigate through the book using the page forward and back keys, the search facility or, if the publisher has provided one, with the interactive table of content...