eProduction Woes: What to Do When Your ebook is Delayed

For anyone who has ever relied on any external source to convert your books, you may have experienced delays for various reasons. Perhaps there are a million ongoing tweaks for the perfect conversion, or you have a complex book.

If you’ve ever distributed your titles pre-publication (metadata + cover image/pre-pub) and the publication date approaches without any content (EPUB/Mobi) distributed to vendors you may receive messages requesting files. Should your conversion be delayed and you want to push back the publication date there are three simple steps:

Change the Publication Date

This can be done two ways. The first is by updating via metadata ingestion (spreadsheet or ONIX) with the new publication date:

Spreadsheet columns titled Publication Date and Street Date. The date in all cells under these columns is 20140502.

Once you have updated your locally stored metadata you will need to ingest it via FTP or the “Ingest Files” option in CoreSource (below).

CoreSource website menu shows My Titles circled in orange and under the My Titles dropdown, an arrow points to the "Ingest Files" option

If you are revising your book in CoreSource, please be aware that this information can be overwritten with metadata ingestions that have conflicting dates. To update in CoreSource, select any asset you would like to change in order to ensure that in the end all assets will reflect the same publication date. On the Basic Information tab, click the “Edit” button where you will be able to revise your publication date. Once this is complete click “Save All Fields.”

On a CoreSource page, the Edit button and Publication Date are circled in orange

Change the On Sale Date

At the moment, the CoreSource metadata template does not support revisions to the On Sale Date. The easiest way to change this date is through the “Pricing & Product Supply” section of your asset details. You will see an “Edit” button on the right side of the screen.

On the Pricing and Product Supply tab for an asset in CoreSource, the edit button is circled and so is the Pricing and Product Supply tab.

Another Edit button appears under the Supply and Pricing section. Click this “Edit” button, change the On Sale Date in the pop-up window, then click “Continue.” Remember to save your changes before distributing! Click “Save All Fields.”

On the Pricing and Product Supply tab in CoreSource, the Edit button in the supply and pricing section is circled in orange, as well as the On sale date category. The save all fields button is also circled in orange.