The Godthief Is Coming!

Godthief is copy-complete and in the hands of my beta readers, going through final proofreading right now. It should be released in eBook format either at the very end of May, or the very beginning of June — most likely June, allowing for time for Amazon to process it and make it available.

This is the first book I have written using pandoc as part of my writing workflow. Using pandoc forces one additional intermediate step of saving a copy of the manuscript in .DOCX format, for the time being, because pandoc's .ODT reader module is… severely buggy. But pandoc — although not perfect — does an IMMENSELY better job of generating usable, editable XHTML than the libepubgen that LibreOffice/OpenOffice uses.

Using LibreOffice's EPUB export, the workflow basically becomes: Export as EPUB, fix up the EPUB in Calibre and/or Sigil, hand-update it for EPUB 3.3 compliance, strip out every last bit of the ghastly formatting, throw away the CSS, then go through the entire book line by line manually re-applying the formatting correctly and hand-writing new CSS.

Using the ODT-to-DOCX-to-pandoc method, I still have to write new CSS, and I still have to massage some formatting by hand, and I still have to go through the manuscript manually re-adding extra blank lines and HR dividers. But all of the text formatting survives, in standard XHTML tags, instead of an almost-illegible sea of <span></span><span></span><span></span><span></span>. (LibreOffice's EPUB export can easily generate XHTML files half of whose total file size is mostly-redundant <span> tags for opaque span classes.)