This has been an interesting week. What was supposed to be just a weekend project turned into a week-long research project. Along the way, I got to make a bunch of new friends, learned a lot, and actually made progress.
Before I go any further, let me say that I did get the iTunes store to accept my ePub file. This article will explain in detail what I tried and what I learned.
I started the process last week, when I attempted to sign in to iTunes Connect using my iPhone developer account and found it wouldn’t work.
Read iTunes won’t let you publish books if you write software
This wasn’t a big deal-breaker. All I needed was another email address and I was in. Amazingly (for Apple), I had a signed and approved publisher contract almost immediately. By contrast it took something like three weeks for my personal iPhone contract to be approved and almost three months for my company’s application to be approved.
The next step was preparing the ePub and uploading it to the iTunes store. Everything validated, I got a big green check-mark indicating success, and yet the book didn’t appear in iTunes Connect. I tried a bunch of different ideas, ran into mostly brick walls, and then wrote about my experiences.
Read iTunes Publisher inexplicably fails to publish an iBook. Now what?
So, now you’re caught up. What followed were two days with a lot of communication. I got a surprisingly large number of email messages from other publishers and individuals who were experiencing the same problem, along with many TalkBack postings from people who also experienced similar problems.
My favorite TalkBack came from Edesw88 who got the Paranoid-Much? Award for thinking that perhaps Apple’s servers blocked the book because it has the word “Jobs” in the title. We have posted our concerns in the past about Apple’s unclear approval policy, but I’m pretty sure the book wasn’t censored for political reasons.
Aside: As many of you know, I write a lot of politics-related material. Because I’m privy to some sensitive national security and counterterrorism details outside of the media realm, I self-censor much of what I write. In terms of media organizations and companies I’ve worked with, I’ve only been censored once for all I’ve written — and that one time it was actually a polite request to not publish, rather than any sort of demand. That said, I will be self-censoring some information for this article.
In addition to being contacted by people who experienced the problem, I was also contacted by certain very knowledgeable people who gave me some very helpful hints. It felt like Christmas in June. What follows are those tips, some experiments I tried, and — later — my results.
