The Nine Word Film Review Book?

After sending a desperate email all in capitals to Kindle/Amazon imploring someone to please contact me and tell me why the paperback version of The Ten Word Film Review Book would not pass approval and go live, I actually, finally received a phone call from Seattle. I don’t know whether I was more surprised to hear from them at all, or the fact that I spoke to an actual human being. Anyway, what I was told was that the page numbering was wrong. My internal pages started at 2, rather than 1. (This is because I did the artwork in InDesign and used auto-numbering, and page 1 was the cover.) All I needed, supposedly, was to change the numbering.

Now, this did beg the question “Seriously? Am I not allowed to number my pages in my own book how the blazes I choose?” And also the question “If you have got a system which is sophisticated enough to spot a problem like this and reject a file based on it, why isn’t your system sophisticated enough to simply email me and tell me that’s what it’s done?!” But I let both those questions hang in the air, choosing instead to ruminate on the practicalities of changing my page numbering.

The body of the manuscript itself was not a problem. Delete page 1 and all the other auto-numbering would adjust accordingly. More of an issue, however, was the index. The index is huge, it has about 2,800 lines in it, and I really didn’t fancy ploughing through and changing every number individually. Fortunately, I thought of a handy workaround – the old Find and Replace. Simply find every instance of 5 and replace it with 4, 6 with 5, and so on.

Which was a great plan, until I realised some films also have numbers in their titles. This is how I ended up with a selection of implausible sounding prequels: The 38 Steps, 27 Days Later, the Dudley Moore comedy 9, 20 Jump Street, Catch 21, 49 First Dates, and my own personal favourite, Fahrenheit 8/10.

All sorted now. I’m waiting for my proof copies to see just how professional/amateurish the Kindle we’ll-print-them-one-at-a-time system is. Given my experience with even getting this far I’m not optimistic, but with the scale of their operation you’d like to think Amazon would have a handle on it, right? Right?