Free on Kindle. December 27-29, 2012. Enjoy

And here's my interview revisited...

http://morgensauthorinterviews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/author-interview-no490-with-ya-writer.html

Tell all your friends and family to download my book for free.  It would be even better if they read it!

FINALLY available as an iBook on iTunes

It has taken a really long time due to the stupid hoops Apple makes you jump through to (directly) publish on iTunes....
drumroll please...
with much thanks to my brother Nicholas,
Secrets of a Summer Village is now for sale on the shelves of the iBookstore near you!

 Here it is on the iTunes Bookstore (in Germany) as seen on my MacBook:

 

And here it is as seen on Nicholas' iPad:

 

This has taken many months, and a lot of trying on my side, and a lot of time on Nicholas' side.  But it's there now, and I hope people buy it from the iBookstore, because it sure wasn't easy to get it on their "shelves"!

Hope

This article gives me hope that self-publishing can really work in the favor of authors with non-mainstream books: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-i-became-a-best-selling-author-.html

Link courtesy of my brother, Scott. Gracias, hermano!

Waiting for the proofs

As you will notice as you read through previous posts, there is a lot of waiting involved in publishing. Waiting isn't easy for anyone - and I hear that when you're published by a publishing house rather than self-publishing, there's MUCH more waiting involved. Another reason I'm glad I'm self-publishing.

My book is now available for Kindle, and has only been purchased by friends and family thus far. Of course, nobody else knows it exists because I have done zero promotion whatsoever, unless you count Facebook and e-mail (read: friends and family). And many of them don't own a Kindle. I don't own a Kindle. So I understand the low sales.

As we speak, I am waiting for proof copies of the paper version from Lulu.com and Createspace.com, my two POD publishers. I hope they come FAST because I am so curious how they turned out. And I hope that they're perfect and require no changes because the faster they are ready, the faster I can start promoting my book. I will not do any promotion until a paper version is available. The media says that paper books are on their way out, but judging by how few of my friends and family own Kindles (which are the #1 e-readers, I understand), paper books will not die soon.

Long live paper!

Not so fast

Bismillah. I have sent the necessary files to Amazon for publication on Kindle! Next up, BN.com/Nook and Apple iBooks. Paper versions will follow.

In the back of my mind, I've been thinking that this is way too easy. That anyone can and will start putting up random books that they write, and that Amazon will be inundated with bizarre, unedited, spontaneous "books".

I really don't think that's going to happen. Even with all of the technological advances that have been made, it's not as simple as uploading a Word file and there you go, you have an e-book. And maybe that's intentional - because Amazon doesn't want an avalanche of random e-books.

Getting a book up there takes quite a lot of work. Allow me to elaborate:

1. Write a book in your "spare" time.
2. Reread, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit until you can't take it anymore.
3. Torture your friends and loved ones with your manuscript, at which point you think you hope they're honest.
4. Take the honest feedback and edit some more, until you're fed up.
5. Take a break. A year is good.
6. Revisit your manuscript and edit some more until you want to give up.
7. You think you're done? Read it through one more time. Believe me, you'll find changes that need to be made.
8. Decide that it will never be perfect, and decide it's ready to publish.
9. Save file as .HTML
10. Convert file to Mobi using Mobipocket Creator
11. View with Kindle Previewer.
12. You thought you were done? No. Now you can see the strange formatting caused by a power struggle with MS Word, which takes the liberty of inserting weird formatting at random and where you don't want it. Make a note of all the odd stuff.
13. Go back into Word document or into .HTML document and take the crazy MS stuff out.
14. Repeat steps 10, 11, and 12. You won't find all the errors the first time.
15. Repeat step 13.
16. Repeat steps 10 and 11 as many times as necessary to get rid of as much weird stuff as you can before you are fed up with it.
17. View your document with the Kindle Previewer and look carefully at every single page (all 300-something of them) to catch any last-minute errors. If you still find some, which you will, repeat steps 13 and 10. Decide that you have found enough errors and you want to publish this document before your head explodes.
18. Fill out all the required information and upload .prc file and cover art to Amazon. (This is after spending days creating and perfecting the cover art, with the help of your sweet husband).
19. Hold your breath and click "Save and Publish".

TIRED YET???

I am not by any means good at computer stuff, but self-publishing requires you to stretch the computer-scientist part of your brain. It is an interesting exercise. You will gain some appreciation for people who work with computers behind-the-scenes.

Now, I will have to do slightly different processes to post on BN, Apple, and on-demand publishing sites. I guess I'd better get some rest...

To-Do List

I suppose if your book is picked up by a publisher, they still expect you to do lots of editing, but they take care of the rest - the cover, the formatting, the electronic formatting, the publicity, the book review requests. But that's all up to me, and I'm learning. I've got an almost-perfect (as perfect as it's gonna get) version of my book. Levent just needs to read over it one more time to catch the things that I didn't catch, before I upload it electronically to Amazon.com, BN.com, and iBooks. I have to change the formatting before converting it to a format that they accept, too - the formatting doesn't work the same way on Word as it does on EPUB.

Here's what else I am working on:

• my cover art
• a letter to send to newspapers, etc... for publicity purposes
• a list of places who will receive my publicity letter
• creating a blog for myself where friends, family, and unknown readers can contact me
• a one-paragraph summary of my book - like the kind of thing you'd find on the back cover of a book