"How do you solve a problem like 🎵 --" (The Sound of Mucous, starring --) with Addendum

This article is a divertimento about book formatter Word-2-Kindle’s endless chain of snafus perpetrated in the interior production of my book, “I Forgive” and Other Delusions. This post would be twenty to thirty inches long were I to catalog all the indicators of ignorance presented to me by W2K over the past several months. To simplify, following is my most recent email to Nick, principal or assigned torturer of the company.

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Nick –

It’s a fail. And while I hate to sound (or become) paranoid, I have to assume that either your formatting staff are complete morons, or they are toying with me, like fun sociopaths, at your behest.

I told you that starting with the article I mean you, little one, the Index page numbering was off. I gave you a representative list of examples of this: articles on page 105, 114, 115, 175, 198 and 328, which are assigned incorrect Index page numbers.

Well, your pathetic or sociopathic staff apparently manually fixed just those page numbers I cited, when it was perfectly clear that I was indicating that Index page numbering was globally flawed from page 105 on.

Looking at your latest revision file (W2K-_I Forgive_and Other Delusions-Reformat-Rev1.pdf), I checked a few articles at random and their corresponding Index referents:

Bad Supervisor. It’s on page 121 and the Index says 119.

Son of Bad Supervisor. It’s on page 126 and the Index says 123.

Inner child deluxe. It’s on page 324 and the Index says 311.

I hope you are not AI, Nick. If you are a person, then I figure you are either laughing at me (which I assumed during our previous era) or are eye-gougingly exasperated by your staff’s incompetence (not as much as I am, but some).

At this point, Word-2-Kindle’s advantage is that I have too many difficult-to-swallow grievances to put them all in a critical review. I may have to use my writing skills to condense them into an Absurdist play or similar, published at The Pessimistic Shrink blog, Yelp and others.

-- Fred L.

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In fact, W2K has exceeded a dozen revisions to address its own errors. Most errors were small irritations (deleting line spaces above and below indented quotes; inexplicably shrinking the size of running heads, etc.) as opening acts to two major ones that have occupied my psyche since last year. (Here is one of them, the margin disaster, all pages off-center and pressed against the spine):

The present Index numbering fiasco may be the final blow and the final mystery. In Microsoft Word, one embeds codes throughout the book to generate an Index. The result should be a flawless correspondence of book page number to Index page number. And yet somehow, somehow, W2K has managed to dishonor these embed codes part-way through the book. I’m stupefied, and at the end of my energies and patience.

My book remains for sale at Amazon. The ebook, produced by a different formatting service, is serviceable; the paperback by W2K looks amateurish. I would still recommend either for those interested in feeling-centered depth therapy that respects, uniquely, the holistic person as body, mind and time.

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Addendum and finale, March 16

Word-2-Kindle provided me yet another revision file, this one meant to correct the book-wide discrepancy between articles’ page numbers and their corresponding Index page numbers. The revision file looked good: perfect sync between text and Index pagination. They did it, presumably by reactivating Word's Index-generating process. But then I began to scroll through the articles. What I discovered to my stupefaction was that Word-2-Kindle hadn’t corrected the Index. It had reduced the number of pages in the book to adapt to the flawed Index by digitally compressing letters and words, their escapements and the space between words. Articles that had occupied two pages now fit on one.

I revealed my discovery to Nick, the head man, describing it as the apotheosis of "ass-backwards." His response:

“It's important to note that our team does not directly update the index as it requires the use of MS Word, whereas our interior formatting process utilizes different software. Consequently, updating the index must be handled on your end.

“Here's our process: Once you approve the formatted PDF that we will send for the Print interior, we will provide you with a Word Doc version of it so you can update the index according to your specifications. After you have completed the index, you can send the Word Docx of the Index back to us and our team will then apply the index to the Print interior.

“Regarding the spacing of the articles, I understand your concerns about the tight spaces and the appearance of the articles. Please be assured that some tight spaces are intentionally incorporated by our formatting team to ensure proper placement and alignment of the articles within the manuscript.”

I replied:

“If you had informed me of your limitations regarding Word (a program I assumed "Word-2-Kindle" had great facility with) at the beginning or early stages of this labyrinthine and exhausting process, I might have either given up then, or tried to work with those limitations. As it is, you have worn me out. Like Rachmaninoff, who was plied with requests to encore his famous Prelude Op 3 No 2 in c-sharp minor so often that he sickened of the piece, I can't stand to look at my book anymore. As said, it is time to part ways.”

And his rejoinder:

“We apologize for the inconvenience and for the short notice regarding the process we follow on how we deal with indexes.

 

"Should [you] have other concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are always here to help.”

 

Nick has been consistently polite, in a lobotomized and possibly mocking sort of way, from start to end, and as consistently unforthcoming about his company's technical deficiencies and poor quality control. Note that my back-and-forth emailing with Mr. Caya (and for a short while, his Bahamian accomplice “Krizia”) began in November of last year, most of which consisted of my requests that his staff fix their errors.