Tuesday, 18 February 2025

How to Check for DRM on eBooks in Calibre Really Quickly

Piles of books on a desk with a Kindle in front of them

How to Check for DRM in Calibre

If you, like me, are downloading all your Kindle books before Amazon take away the ability to do so on the 26th Feb 2025 and are using Calibre to keep them all catalogued, you may be wondering about DRM.

Unfortunately, it is a fact of life that some books with have DRM, which makes them unreadable on anything except the Kindle anyway. The only way you figure this out is when you go to view the books and it says it can't open them because of DRM.

There is a really quick and simple way to highlight multiple books and find out which ones have DRM without having to open all of them individually:

Attempt to convert them

If they have DRM the conversion with fail.

Steps to Check for DRM

Import the books into Calibre by highlighting the files in your Kindle download directory and dragging them onto the Calibre book listing.
If you don't already have it as a column, add the formats column to your Calibre layout - this will make those that have failed easy to see.

Click the Preferences button in the main menu
Choose "Add your own columns"
Check the box next to formats (#13 on mine) and hit save

Now select all the books that need checking in the main book listing.
Click "Convert books" from the main menu
Choose the book format you wish to convert into from the dropdown - I use ePub because it is the most universal - and hit go.
Error messages will pop up for those books that won't convert - just click the close button, we don't need to remember which ones have failed.
Now all those books which don't have the additional format in the format col are the ones with DRM. I then added a tag to all the DRM books so I can find them easily again later when I decide what to do with them.

If there is a simpler way of doing this, please LMK, but I couldn't see one inside Calibre. This was the quickest way to do it all in bulk that I could find.

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Monday, 17 February 2025

Don't Lose Face! Aka Writing Tip - How Not to Forget What Your Characters Look Like #writing #fiction

A writer's desk with a laptop, pens and pads, books, a coffee cup and a pencil pot.

Don't Lose Face!

Writing Tip - How Not to Forget What Your Characters Look Like

For much of my writing life, I wrote fanfic, before I decided to turn my hand to being a professional word jockey. I still write fanfic from time to time because it's fun, and the one thing we don't have to worry about it describing our characters, because everyone knows what they look like. Oh, we describe their wounds or their clothing in loving details, and maybe their moles because we can, but with TV and movies they have the face of real actors and in books they have been lovingly described by their creator.

This is not the case in original fiction.

I don't know about you, but I forget things. While some people have perfect memories, crisp and clear like the screen of the latest smartphone, mine is more like an old rolodex where some of the cards are water damaged and others are missing entirely.

Old fashioned rolodex on a wooden table.

Also, I don't see my characters clearly in my head when I'm writing. They're more impressions than real people, even though I know who they are and what they are doing. This is fine when I'm in the first excited glow of creation, but coming back after a little while away from a project and it can make things tricky. All this has led me to one conclusion that I think can be really useful for all we mere mortals:

Character Bios are our friends!

Now anyone who knows me will tell you I write like a chaos demon. As it comes to me it goes on the page. I jump around the narrative, I fill bits in as I figure out what needs to go there, and I don't have a plan. Sometimes I write the end before I have any clue what the beginning is at all.

This is the opposite to my twin sister who has scene outlines longer than some of my scenes at times😆.

However, I have picked up the habit of filling out character bios. Not when I start - that would be too organised😉, but I create them when I introduce a character and fill them out as I go.

Do you realise how embarrassing it is to find out your main character has been swapping eye colour all the way through your novel?

Well I do 😆.

Yes, a good editor will catch such things, but just writing it down when we first decide on it saves so much time. I promise! Even the spelling of a name, or a person's full name is good to record. Hands up everyone who decided on the surname for a character, had a gap in writing and came back only to reinvent the wheel and give them a whole new one. *sheepishly waves hand in the air*

Most writing software like Scrivener and yWriter have specific places for character bios, but a normal Word document or an Excel Spreadsheet works just as well. I usually start with a simple template:

Full Name:
Known As:
Age:
Gender:
Hair Colour:
Eye Colour:
Height:
Ethnicity:

If we have a fantasy or sci-fi setting we can add things like race and powers, or for real world genres more mundane things like job etc.

We don't have to fill everything in, just whatever is relevant. Then we have a reference to refer back to if our rolodex gets even more soggy😉.

This technique really helped me when I was writing my serial stories as Virginia Waytes for the podcast. It's similar to how TV writers have show bibles so they can come back in anytime or pass the job on to a new member of the team. These little bios are nothing so grand, but boy, do they help me from getting in a right pickle. I heartily recommend using something along the same lines even if your writing is chaos embodied like mine!

Have you ever managed to forget what you named a character, or given them two different hair or eye colours? Or are you much more organised than me?😆