I have a few problems:

• My cover shows up as cover art but not as the first page;
• My subtitles are inexplicably showing up on separate pages from the rest of the story;
• My author picture will not cooperate and jumps randomly all over the page;
• There is a blank page after the dedication page that I can’t figure out.

I realize that the blank page may be because of the fact that I’ve put the table of contents in after the dedication.  Maybe it’s creating a section break and a new page, since it doesn’t actually show up as a page in an ebook?  I delete it and recreate it at the end.

The blank page goes away.  Great success!

I rearrange the author picture.  On iBooks on my computer, at least, it cooperates.  Great success!

I look at the ToC.

There are now extra sections added before every chapter.  Like it’ll have a page number for “Section 1” and then the actual name of the story as a new line, repeated for each story.

(Note that each of these changes, throughout this entire document, involves saving my original document in Pages and then republishing it as an epub, then importing it into iBooks, remembering each time to change my name to my pen name, choose a genre, and click the “Display first page as cover” option.)

I look carefully at my subtitles.  They are, in fact, formatted as subtitles.  I check the table of contents to make sure it’s not supposed to be looking at subtitles.  It isn’t.  I click them on and back off anyway.  I add a second copy of the cover image on what is technically the second page of the document to see if I can get it to show up on the screen.

It works!  It breaks all my other sections and I have to fix them.

I fix them.

The ToC is still displaying randomness.  I think that maybe it’s a bug, and go through and format all of my subtitles as body text.

Suddenly the subtitles aren’t showing up as extra pages.  Partial success!  They’re still in the goddamn ToC though.

I take a closer look, turning on the “Show Invisibles” option.  I note that while the text of my subtitles are all reset as body text, there is a carriage return before each subtitle that is still formatted as a subtitle.  I fix that.  They’re now on the same page as the titles, where they belong, but the ToC is still fucked.

I fiddle with the author picture, to no avail.  Sometimes I get it right and then change something entirely unrelated to it and it goes away.

I add copyright information to the dedication page.  Pagination goes haywire again and I fix that.  I’m still getting ToC nonsense.

Here’s how the story titles have looked:

The Benevolence Archives 1
“The Place it’s Farthest From”

I fix them so that they look like this:

“The Place it’s Farthest From”
The Benevolence Archives 1

I make no other changes at all, but the ToC inexplicably fixes itself.

I notice that in BA 7 one of the quotation marks in the title is a smart quote.  One of them.  This leads me on a maddening search-and-destroy mission for smart quotes, which are initially resistant to a simple find-and-replace, an impediment I eventually get around.

I spend the next hour with my eyes bleeding making tiny edits to line placement, the occasional grammatical/punctuation error, and weird things
where return got hit randomly in the wrong place or

there’s an inexplicable gap in the words.

The bleeding from my eyes starts mucking up my shirt.

I go to bed.

tl;dr: shit’s coming out soon.  This weekend, if Amazon doesn’t force a couple of days of some sort of review on me.