Saturday, June 25, 2011

Perfectionism is a Pain

I have my novel formatted for Kindle. I put it on my Kindle to read through and check for errors and other things that might need changing. Made my notes, fixed the problems, saved it again. Then re-uploaded it back to the Kindle to check over one last time. Found more errors and more things I wanted to fix. In the meantime, I found a few things in my research that needed to be changed: historical errors I’d made, some of which were pretty major and couldn’t be left in. I’ve applied this last round of changes to the file, and here’s where the problem...

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Self-Publishing for Print

I’m a research fanatic. When I get interested in something, or decide I want to do (or buy) something, I first get online and research the hell out of it. I love having as much information as possible before I make a decision, especially when that decision is going to impact my checkbook. I Google, I read message boards, stalk blogs, whatever I have to do to find the information I need. So when I made up my mind that I was going to give self-publishing a serious try, my first step was research. Initially, I was researching ebooks. For a self-publisher...

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Pardon my dust

I've been messing around with my blog layout today, trying to get it to match my eventual website. Man, what a mess!  I think I've got it mostly worked out now, so it's time to go watch Jeopardy!...

Sunday, June 12, 2011

That pesky copyright page

One of the aspects of self-publishing that has had me oddly stumped has been the copyright page. This shouldn’t be difficult, yet for some reason, I’ve been stalled for weeks because I haven’t had anything on that page. I did numerous Google searches, scanned publishing blogs, dug through the Kindle DTP community forums… you name it, I looked.  But the only mentions of copyright I seemed to find were mentions of where to put the page, questions about the page not being linked properly in the TOC, and a ton of forum posts about obtaining copyright...

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Back in Business

Last weekend, I had a small setback in my self-pub plans. The goal was to finish the Kindle formatting and move on to print and/or ePub research. Instead, I got to spend the weekend setting up a new computer. My old computer, which is about 5 years old, had started freezing up on me ever since a storm last week. We had a momentary power outage – enough that everything electronic shut off – so I think there was enough of a surge, even with my surge protector, that something happened to it. I kept having to reboot it, and at one point it started...

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Traffic? I have traffic?!

Out of curiosity, I signed into my Blogger account today and clicked on the stats link. You know, for shits and giggles. I've been blogging for about a month now (after not blogging for a while when my agent hunt fizzled), but since I haven't yet promoted my blog anywhere, I haven't expected people to read it. It's mostly been for myself, and to have an online presence later on when I'm closer to publishing and set out to actually start promoting my novel. But I guess my post yesterday got indexed in some searches, probably because of the timely...

Page 1 of 2312345Next