Drudgery

I have four books to enter in the Eppies (the award for excellence in e-publishing) this year. I had intended to enter pdfs, but after some discussion on the EPIC list, it appears that most of the judges prefer HTML because they can read it on their handheld readers. Unfortunately, NCP produces a really nice-looking pdf document, but their HTML documents leave something to be desired. Most notably, they omit all italics. I use quite a lot of italics, and I don't feel that my dialogue reads well without them. Furthermore, there are various spacing problems (occasionally paragraphs are run together, and spaces between scenes tend to be omitted). So I am going through every one of the HTML versions of my books, inserting italics, and correcting the spacing. Considering three of these four books are full novels, and one is a longish novella, this is a whole lot of really tedious work that could better be spent writing.