The Sea of Swirly Twirly Formatting

I'll have to get a reader--as soon as I can afford one.

Every means to check the formatting of Burning Daylight gives me different results.  I keep saying I can't fix it if I can't see it here on my computer in Word.

I've separated sections of the chapters with musical notes.  I thought that was cute.  Kindle thought it was a swell idea.  Nook is confused--I get question marks.  Ok.  I don't know how to solve that except to do 2 different versions and in the Nook I'll insert jpgs of musical notes.

What a freaking hassle.  I don't know what's wrong.  I sent the document to my pal who knows much more about computers than I do but unfortunately he doesn't have Word, he uses Open Office.  What he sees instead of musical notes is Open Office's response to nonprinting characters.  What I see is musical notes but tiny.  But it hardly matters to me what OO is thinking because I'm working in Word.

Oh it doesn't stop there.

Nook objects strenuously to the formatting of the lyrics.  I "indented" (you're not allowed to do this by tab so I used the ruler thing.  Kindle was pretty okay with it.

All the images were tiny with Nook.  Same size images with the Kindle emulator are fine.  Again, I can't fix this because I don't know what's wrong and what I see in Word is fine.

So okay let's put it in Calibre and see what the epub file looks like.  Crummy is a word I would use.  But you can't edit in Calibre you have to use Sigil.  So that's what I face this afternoon.

At this point in reader development, the less formatting you have, the better off you are.  Maybe iPads are better but since you can't upload to their store with anything but a Mac and I have a PC, I have no idea.  Since iPad uses epub format and so does Nook, either I go thru Smashwords or not at all.  Since I want to control my books at B&N, I won't use Smashwords.  So no Apple Bookstore for me.

I guess nearly everything I said yesterday was disproven today.  What a dismaying thought.  Actually tho, to be perfectly fair to myself, I was the one who pulled the file off Nook.  It would have been acceptable the way it was.  If epub couldn't read the notes I could have left the space blank like with all the other books.

I don't know what's bothering Amazon today but I'm pretty sure I didn't have anything to do with Elvis' death nor do I have anything to do with why Amazon can't get the file converted.  If BN managed to do it in about 3 minutes, it's not me.

The less formatting you do the better.

3 hours later.  Amazon is still struggling to convert the file.  Everything is fine with BN.  As far as I can tell.  I should be able to see it tomorrow.  After all they don't take 3 days to publish like Amazon does.