I spent the entire evening setting up A Chant of Love and Lamentation to be available directly on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and also hardcopy that can be ordered through Amazon POD. I’m exhausted, but it’s nice to get that off my mind.
I’m now beginning to undertake the next step — figuring out how to get physical copies of A Chant of Love and Lamentation. Some folks prefer their books the old-fashioned way. I know I do (at least for now).
There are four services I’m looking at: Lulu.com, Blurb.com, CreateSpace, and TheBookPatch.com. Of these, the last two have the best pricing, but I think CreateSpace will win out in the end because they have distribution channels through Amazon.
I’d be looking at a book price around $12.00 for a trade-size paperback of around 300 pages. Once I make a decision, I’ll need to convert the file again before uploading it. That part might not be so hard (one can hope).
As a special celebration, I’m offering a deep discount on A Chant of Love and Lamentation. Log in to http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/110200 and use code WT98H.
Just taking a little breather today. I’ve been working for the last week to get everything up and running, particularly the manuscript. Coming up I’d like to discuss my thoughts on self-publishing vs. traditional. That could be a long post!
As of 10:45 pm this evening, A Chant of Love and Lamentation was submitted to Smashwords, where it was successfully converted and is now available! In a week or two it will also become available on Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and other platforms. It’s official.
You know how you were taught, in that typing class eons ago, to hit “Tab” when starting a new paragraph. Yeah, don’t do that. At least, don’t do that if you plan to submit your finished 117,000-word novel for e-publication. I just finished going through and deleting the tab indent in front of every single paragraph in the entire novel, a task which took about an hour. At least that’s done!
The next step is building a Table of Contents. It won’t take long, but it’s something that, for some reason, I never thought of myself.
I’m getting more and more excited as I grow close to getting the manuscript finished. Some day soon I want to write my thoughts on self-publishing vs. traditional publishing and what it means for someone who was raised in a certain paradigm. But for now I’ll just stick with these updates.
Welcome to my blog, another little slice of the Net. At the time of this writing, I’m in the process of prepping my novel, A Chant of Love and Lamentation, to submit it to Smashwords for publication on all platforms — Kindle, Nook, iPad, and lots of other readers. The process is not difficult, but it does take time and attention to detail. For example, last night I discovered I need to remove all Tab indents because they have strange effects on e-readers. Who knew? There is a way to do this in Word using the Find/Replace function, but since I’m using Open Office instead, things don’t work exactly the same and so I found I couldn’t do it the quick way. This means going through, paragraph by paragraph, all 117,000 words of the manuscript, and manually deleting tab indents. Good times.
More to come as I go through this process. And thank you for your interest!
Brian Reeves 