It’s been a long
hard slog, to rephrase a Gilderoy Lockhart quote from JK Rowling. I
hadn’t realized how much work self publishing a book would be. And,
if you believe most of the pundits, I’ve only dome half the work.
I, well I should say we, haven’t really done anything to promote
the book aside from tell everyone we know. I should mention here that
this is not the book that I have been working on for several years,
Amara’s Law, it is a short story anthology that I and three other
writers from my writer’s group decided to put together. However, it
does contain a short story spin-off that is a taste of the world that
I have created for Amara’s Law, following one of the characters of
the book. It’s a fairly exciting tale of kidnap, escape, chase and,
of course, bloody danger. The anthology is titled: Tales from the
Locals, it is currently available on Amazon.com as both a trade size
paperback for $3.99, and a kindle edition for $0.99.
I would like to
claim that I did all the formatting and editing my self, but I need
to give another shout out to my sister in law, she handled the
interior format of the paperback version, for which I owe her a large
debt of gratitude. The original file looked OK, and I was decently
happy with it, however, when she was done with it, it looked like a
real book! I was floored, she didn’t make any huge changes, but
what she did do nudged the book from being well formated, but
amateur, to looking like a real book.
I will however
take credit for the kindle edition. Granted I had a decent starting
point, but it did take me several days in Calibre to get the formatting just
right so it looked good on a Kindle or Kindle App. Funny thing,
editing and e-book is a lot like editing a web page crossed with a
Word document, there is a lot of HTML style tags and predefined
styles that can be used or changed to suit the circumstance.
The original idea was to do this as an exercise to find out all about self
publishing. It was an experience, and now that I’ve done it, I
think I would be willing to do it again in the future. We’ll see.
