Going to Do It!

OK, you finished your novel.  YAY!!!  After 4 years, it’s done.  Endless hours, often late into the night, you toiled to get it just right.  They say once you finish your story you should polish it and polish it, then polish it some more.  You’ve polished it so long that some of the “i”s are missing their dots.

That sound like you?  It sounds like me to a tee.  I decided I can’t be alone out there in this feeling, so I decided to blog about the trials and tribulations of getting my books on Kindle.  I tried the conventional print method, but I could never get past the agent search.  After only a handful of query letters I gave up.  That could be a blog entry all of its own, and it will be at some point.

So in this series I am going to talk about the process and the amusement and anguish along the way.  Every once in awhile, something will work easily, and I’ll have cause to celebrate.  I don’t think that will include the cover art though.  Even though it’s not print, it’s been suggested that a good cover still matters.  I tend to agree with that as we are a visual society.  I suspect that on social media, images get shared more than plain links, and are probably more likely to get clicks as well.

I have all the tools, or know where to get them either cheap or free.  I have my concepts visualized in my head.  And I roughly know the process for Kindle.  I take my version upload it, and let Kindle do the conversion  Easy.  But if I remember correctly from my previous research, it’s a good idea to make sure in the process none of the desired formatting was lost. They recommend html, and since I have a familiarity with it, that's what I'll use.  But I will still create my final final final manuscript in document form.

I have three completed manuscripts, and have decided that the first will be my romance novel entitled Soul Searching.  It happens to be my wife's favorite, and I have an idea for cover art.  In the coming evenings, she will be doing the final read through, looking for any typos we might have missed in the last three final edits, and any formatting errors that might have cropped up from using a backup copy in PDF format.  I'll tell you about THAT next time.

So stay tuned for more blogs, coming soon.