I started the year with great plans to catch up with the backlog and crack on with new stuff. (Wow, I got a dropped capital.) (Hmm, not sure if I like it or not.) It hasn’t gone well so far …
I’ve checked the job boards every day, but nothing has taken my fancy – or nothing that didn’t need doing Right Now. And I’ve managed a blog post every day so far – all three of them.
Yesterday I got caught up backing-up my entire Kindle catalogue. I’ve discovered that some accounts are being suspended on a whim of someone at head office, and every single book a person has bought has been deleted. I have almost 500 books in my Kindle cloud, plus around 50 or so documents, many of which I’ve paid for. I can’t afford for that to happen to me and I’m sure many others can’t either.
And yes, accounts deleted in error have been reinstated, but it’s apparently been quite a faff over a long period of time, and I can’t afford that either.
So I looked to see if I could back everything up – and what a time-consuming faff that turned out to be as well.
I saved everything to Calibre, but most of the Kindle books are encrypted and Calibre can’t do anything with them, even view them. So then I saved everything to my desktop Kindle-reading app, which could probably also be taken away from me on a whim, but at least my books are in a directory on my desktop now. And I had to do them One. At. A. Time.
Did I mention there were almost 500 of them? It took me most of the day.
I’m sure there’s another way to do this, but so far I haven’t found out what that is. But it’s another reason I’m trying to get around to moving all of my own books from Kindle to another (Draft2Digital) ebook publishing platform. One day, I may also get them back on Smashwords.
So that took up yesterday, and the time in between has been spent editing a book that, quite frankly, could do with going back to the author for completion. But that’s not my shout, it’s just taking considerably longer for me to do the work than it usually would.
Yesterday was also the first day I managed to take the dog for a walk. I was still a bit poorly on Wednesday and stayed in, but I was feeling much better by yesterday and we went for a walk. He hasn’t had one today because we’re going out this evening.
At the moment I’m trying out the new editor on WordPress and I’m not sure that I like it at all. For a start, it’s blocking all of the paragraphs separately, even though I have “block” turned off and “document” turned on – it keeps jumping to block.
Oh, hang on, I’ve closed a menu, and I’m back on “document” properly now … Oh, but it keeps on giving me a formatting menu at the top of the paragraph I’m currently typing. It’s all Very Confusing.
Also, I couldn’t see a running word-count, but I may have found that now. You have to open a separate menu that has an i in a circle. (If I could find “insert special characters” I’d be able to use that instead … )
Aside from taking our December snow from us, this new editing interface is apparently being forced on us in the next month or so. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that, but I hope everything I’m used to is still there somewhere.
I’ve logged a query with the support team. I have a feeling it may be the first of many …
Have a great weekend!
