How to write an Apple e-book Part 1.

I thought it should be easy to write and publish an e-book and was excited when I read that if you use apple's pages app then you can automatically create an e-book.

Well it is not quite so simple as it sounds.

Apple have imposed a whole mass of limitations, not in the sense of freedom of speech, but in the sense of formal restrictions that you need to comply with to be able to start publishing.

Typical of anything apple does is that you can actually do everything your heart desires but you will need a university education - not in quality, more in time - to achieve your goals.

My first problem was that I really wanted to separate my Apple Literature account from my usual account that I use every day.

A major restriction, for safety reasons, is that each Apple Account needs a separate telephone number for double authentification.

Like most people I use the same phone both for business and personal communications. I suppose if you work for a large corporation and you are important enough they might give you a company telephone. There are phones that allow you to put two sim cards into them and I believe Apple's iPhones - some models - have both a physical, one you can change, and a virtual built in Simcard which you can't change. But you have two numbers.

Anyway I don't have this luxury so I am damned to publishing my e-books under my single Apple Identity and phone number.

Having resigned to the fact that I would have to use my personal ID to publish any trash I was about to offer the world I set out to setup what is known as an iTunes-Connect-Account.

We are all used to being forced to set up acounts with varying restrictions on User-Name and Password but this was really ridiculous. Seeing as I had no choice other than using my current apple data it would seem reasonable to assume that Apple would know my basic details. Date of birth, address and so on. But no, one has to reenter all the details

Whoever designs these systems?

But then I received a message that my application to publish was pending and this might take 24 hours. So after about a week I decided to try and make contact with apple and find out what was wrong. I actually received a response within 24 hours telling me that my bank and tax details were incomplete. As far as I could see the bank details were perfect and the only thing that could be missing was a United States Tax account, which of course I didn't have.

So I replied asking for details on what was missing and received the same answer again. Bank and Tax details are missing. Again I sent a plea for help which really was promptly replied to. Even though I am a British citizen not resident in the United States I need to fill out a United States Tax application to publish apple books. Who knows that one?

By this time I was getting fed up with the whole procedure and had read that

Kindle - correctly Kindle Direct Publishing - was an easy path to follow.

Actually Amazon make it really simple, except that you have the same problems with your telephone numbers but you do not have the hassle of setting up a US tax account.

So at last I have both an Apple and an Amazon account from which I can publish my books. Also I have found that Apple's pages app, which I had extensively used on my iMac before really is super for writing an e-book. I can write during the day on my iMac and continue during the day either on my iPhone or iPad. They are not 100% compatible as some of the more complex features are only really available on the iMac but the iPad does not lose any settings even though they may not be edittable.

The synchronisation is almost instant and there is no need to do anything. If I add a sentence on my iPad it is showing on my iMac within a couple of seconds. Absolutely briliant. Let's hope my books are just as good.

Two strange titles: "Do Teddy Bears have souls", and "The brain Cloud" need interpretation but my memoirs title: "The Slut Goddess" seems fairly obvious.

-pw-