Wow, it's been a year!

Jeez, guys! I'm sorry I've been so MIA. I didn't realize so much time had passed.

Last year was busy and in many ways a great year. I really enjoyed my teaching job and got to do a *lot* of new projects which is probably one of the main reasons I let this blog sleep for so long. Then this summer several not-so-great things happened which definitely cramped my writing style both in terms of any blogging that might have happened and any novel writing. But that led to an amazing new chapter in my life: we moved to Hawai'i--the Garden Isle of Kaua'i, to be precise.

There's been a bumpy adjustment period. Many things have changed. For one thing, I'm now teaching middle school math! I really enjoy it, but it is very different from what I was doing before (one of the bad things that happened is that the district closed my school--I'm heartbroken about that). I've started a blog where I'm going to explain how to teach certain math lessons. It's mainly for the parents of my students to use, but you can check it out here, if you're curious.

There's a writer's conference locally in November and I really want to go! One of my goals for this new WiP, which is not set in any of my previous universes, is to attempt to go the traditional publishing route. I make no promises. I may lose patience with that very quickly. One of the reasons I indie publish is that I am a control freak so it really suits me to do everything myself. But I've decided I want to give it a shot, just to see what happens.

I'm snatching little moments here and there to work on the WiP. Like, sometimes only 15 minutes. It's better than nothing. And honestly I'm totally out of the habit of writing for long stints. I stayed home from work one day and could have written for hours and could only manage an hour or so.

For the current WiP I've been doing a lot more planning, outlining, etc. than ever before. I used to be such a pantser. But it's been a gradual process over the last few years propelled by the challenge of not having regular time to write. Now with my writing time in ever more brief snippets, the outline and brainstorms and character descriptions and everything are absolutely essential. There is no way I'd keep track of anything without them.

I have 29K words done and I wish I thought I could do NaNo this year. Maybe I'll try to set myself a more attainable goal and go for it.

How about you, where are you at with your creative projects? How have things changed for you over the years? Let me know in the comments!

Just updating for the sake of updating...

The good news is, I'm writing again, without feeling like I have to force myself. It's the first time I've felt that way since last summer, so I'm really pleased about it.

What's not so great is that this comes at a time when I'm feeling exhausted and have a lot on my plate, so I actually haven't had much time to do the writing. Still, I've managed to add about 3,000 words to The Cradle and the Grave (the fourth novel in my Veronica Barry series). It may not sound like much, but I'm glad it's happening.

Now all I have to do is get the rest of the nonsense sorted and I'll be able to finish this novel and add to the series.

In other news, I tried submitting The City Darkens to two agents. One represents Jacqueline Carey and one represented Marion Zimmer Bradley. Several of their novels are inspirations for TCD. Both agencies turned me down, though. The folks who represented MZB were nice about it--I got a personal email, and they said the setting sounded interesting. They didn't tell me why they were turning it down, though my suspicion is that it's because I've already self-published it. I may try again in a bit. I'm thinking of tracking down Cynthia Voigt's agency next. Maybe Sarah Monette's. I don't feel particularly in a rush. I'm mainly doing this because I need to feel like I'm putting my writing out there. I've been sending TCD to book bloggers but since those that have agreed to review it have all let me know it will be a few months, it just feels like I need something else as well. It would be cool to be accepted by an agent. Like a stamp of approval. I think what I've experienced with self-publishing is that while I like everything that comes with self-publishing, like having control over every aspect (especially the cover), I feel like I'm a speck of sand in a beach full of other self-published authors, and most of them have published their first novel without the benefit of a beta-reader or editor. Which means that most readers will assume I'm publishing my first novel without the benefit of a beta-reader or editor, and that is a damn shame, considering the outstanding quality of my beta-reader, Kathryn. Anyway. My hope is that if I do end up getting traditionally published, maybe I will at least not be a speck of sand in a polluted beach anymore. I don't know what I'll be, but at least not that. That's so far down the road, though. Like I said, I'm in no rush, and I think I may have to wait until I write something new--not a Veronica book or a City book--before I'll really have a shot at interesting someone. Time will tell.

Quality Control for Indie Authors

I've read some bad ebooks.

I never post reviews for them, just because I don't want to hurt some poor struggling author's feelings. I admire anyone who puts themselves out there, you know. Sometimes, I email the author with notes for improving the book, but other times I just don't post anything. I've had folks send me novels to review who are probably scratching their heads.

However, my policy on this is probably going to change, because I just can't stand how badly written ebooks reflect on all ebooks. It's not something that only makes the author of the flawed book look bad. It makes all self-publishers look bad. How can I expect readers to wade through the bad to find the good, when I myself can't seem to do it? It's frustrating, because the best thing for ebooks sales is word of mouth, but you don't get word of mouth until a certain number of people read your book, and a lot of people are just avoiding self-published books because they think 90% of them are crap, and they're right.

I've been talking about this on one of the groups I belong to on Goodreads. It really surprised me when several fellow members posted answers to my initial post saying that they don't see what the big deal about good grammar is, and that some readers/reviewers suddenly think that they are "English teachers" as soon as they pick up an indie book, and that there are too many grammar Nazis. What this tells me is that these authors don't care if their books have major grammatical and stylistic flaws. The fact that they view people who care about grammar as "Nazis" and, worse, "English teachers"... well. I say, if an English teacher reads one of my novels and thinks it's good, then I've really done a great job. And I want that. I want my books to be that good.

There are a few folks on GR who are talking about putting together some sort of consortium of authors/readers/reviewers who would evaluate books for their writing quality (not in terms of content, but in terms of grammar etc.). I may participate in that. I'll keep you posted.

How about you? Do you care about grammar and style when you read a book, or does story just trump everything else? What sorts of things make you pause when you're reading (not in a good way)? If a consortium formed to evaluate books on their writing quality, would their seal of approval make a difference to you?

Free book! Come and get it!

Hi everyone! To celebrate the publishing of The Fire and the Veil, book 2 in my Veronica Barry series, I'm offering my novella, Veronica in Paris, (it's a prequel) for free for a limited time. Go to Smashwords, start a purchase of a copy of Veronica in Paris, and enter coupon code TL69N, which gives you 100% off. Smashwords is convenient because you have many choices as to format (including Kindle and Apple), so you should find one that suits your needs. Enjoy!

Using Tweetadder

In order to quiet some of my "shoulds," I've subscribed to Tweetadder, which Michael R. Hicks recommends for marketing your novels. It's a cool utility. You may get a direct message from me in the next week or so if you follow me on Twitter offering you one of my ebooks for free, for instance. I'll be curious to see if the marketing I'm doing with it amounts to anything. So far, I seem to sell between 1-5 books a month not doing any active marketing at all. If that number increases in any significant way, that would be exciting. I'll be sure to post here with my observations either way.

Also, I've redesigned this blog a bit. What do you think? Do you prefer the previous, aquamarine version, or this beige?

My current "shoulds" of writing

My cbt therapist (or should that be cb therapist?) Shiva, would probably tell me to rephrase this, but there are several things I "should" be doing for my writing right now.*

First of all, there's the sequel to The River and the Roses, which has been through one round of revisions, and probably could stand to undergo about nine rounds more. If I gave it some serious time and energy, I could probably get it up to par for April, and publish it. I even have most of what I need to create the cover. I've been meaning to do this for about six months, with the intention of dropping the price for River to $0.99 once the sequel is out. Why have I not done it yet? Well, aside from the whole pregnancy/bed rest/newborn baby distraction, revisions are... well, work. And often annoying, painful work at that. I read a quote on twitter the other day, I forget from which famous author, saying something about how revisions or rewrites are more pleasant than producing the first draft because you don't have the dread of not finishing the novel hanging over you. I can relate to that, but for me, revisions are way more difficult to get into. Still, and Shiva would approve of this phrase, it would be satisfying to get that item done.

Then there's marketing. I stopped actively marketing my books nearly a year ago, I think, or at least nine months ago. I'm still on twitter and I update my facebook page from time to time, most often to notify you all that I've got a new blog post, actually, but as for directly sending out messages on twitter suggesting that people check out my book, no. Michael R. Hicks, one of those lucky and driven self-pubbed authors who is living the dream (he quit his day job last April, I think it was--I admire him so much!) suggests that the "tipping point" for twitter as a marketing platform is to have 1000+ followers. At the moment I have about 845. I use my twitter account to recommend news articles and just talk about things I'm doing or am interested in. And also let people know when I've posted something new on either this blog or the recipe blog. I don't advertise the family blog because it's much more personal and I figure if you're really that interested in me you'll check it out off this page. And probably most people aren't that interested in me! Anyway, I don't have a problem with people posting on twitter to advertise their books (in fact I try to retweet them when it's clear to me what they are about). Although some people will spam the feed for like, ten minutes, and it makes me wonder whether they've ever read an article about twitter etiquette. So my point is, though, I haven't been doing that. Why not? I feel like until I've got something new to offer, I don't want to risk losing followers because I'm self-promoting for the sake of self-promoting. Probably not sound business reasoning, but there it is. Maybe this week I'll send out a couple of links to my books.

I'm on Pinterest, now, too. Please feel free to follow me. I even have a board devoted to books, although they are books I want to remember to check out, so it seems weird to post my own books there. Maybe I'll create a new board for my books and stuff related to them. I do have a decopunk board where I collected a bunch of stuff to help me world build my current story. So I suppose when (if) it's done and I've published it, I could pin it to that board and it wouldn't be weird.

Speaking of the current novel, it is teetering on the edge of that going-to-be-abandoned cliff because I haven't been working on it regularly and I'll lose so much steam I'll never get it back at this rate. And that would be a shame, I think, because I have some interesting ideas for it. So what would be good there is to set up some sort of schedule or something... and bribe myself with some reward for achieving a word goal too, I think. My attempts to create NaNos outside of the official NaNoWriMo have failed thus far. It's silly, it shouldn't (there's that word again) make a difference whether I'm looking at the official site's graph for the word count or a ticker I created myself, but for some reason, it does. So the trick may be to abandon the large goal of a NaNo and make smaller goals. Shorter term, too. And small rewards as a result. Hm... must give some thought to what rewards would motivate me.

Any suggestions? Must be cheap. We are broke-ish.

How about you, do you have any writing "shoulds" or other projects that need your attention? How do you get yourself on task?

__________________
* By the way, if you have ever struggled with depression or anxiety, I strongly recommend going through cbt. Changed my life, no exaggeration.

fixing the formatting

So I finally got to the bottom (more or less) of the weird formatting problem. As far as I know, it only turned up in Broken Ones (although I ended up reformatting The River and the Roses, just to be safe). Some em-dashes, for no apparent reason, were different from the rest, and as such, unreadable to most ereaders. They would instead show up as 3/4 signs. Just figuring that out took me a while. Then fixing it was a real pain, because I'd copy the bad em-dash and try to do a Find/Replace, only to have Word inform me that there were no such symbols to be found in the document. And I'd be staring at a page with four of them. Argh.

So for the benefit of those who are reading and thinking, how do I avoid this happening to me? I'm going to tell you the best way I've worked out to format a clean copy, free of bizarro em-dashes or other glitches.

First off, read the Smashwords Guide on how to get rid of things like text boxes and inconsistent indents--I never do these even in first drafts so they are not a problem for me. And let me say, if you use tab to indent your paragraphs, it's time to break that habit. The Smashwords Guide gives excellent instructions on the proper way to indent, and I won't go into that here.

The following instructions are based on Guido Henkel's guide to formatting, although I have made several alterations to deal with my em-dash issue and also some other problems I ran into with it. Also, his guide is long and can be intimidating to get through, although I recommend reading it if you want a more thorough explanation of why you're doing each step than you're going to get here.

Download JEdit and Calibre. These are both free programs and you'll need them to make your clean, glitch-free formatted ebook. There are other similar programs out there--if you're confident using them, do so. I know virtually nothing about them and can't adapt my instructions--I can only tell you how I did my formatting, and I used those two programs.

Before you start these steps, go into your word processing document and make sure you have all curly quotation marks. You may choose to do Find/Replace on each type, to be sure: there are “double” quotation marks and ‘single’ quotation marks. Make sure all of these are curly. You also need to Find/Replace all typed out ellipses to a symbol representing ellipses. That is, you probably have three periods in a row, like this: ... but what you need is a single ellipses symbol, like this …  . They look pretty much the same, right? But if you use the arrow keys to go over them, in the first instance you have three separate characters, and in the second, just one. You can copy and paste from this page into your Find/Replace boxes, if you like.

Okay, now that those preliminary steps are out of the way, we're ready for the process that will kill glitches in your formatting. Take a deep breath. There's some code coming up, and it can look scary. It's okay, though--you're just copying and pasting, and finding and replacing. You can do this.

Steps to Clean Formatting

In your Word doc:

1. Find/Replace: In Find box, type Ctr + i and in Replace box, put <i>^&</i>  . Replace all. (This preserves any italics you've got in your document for later--if you don't do this step, you'll lose all italic formatting.)
2. Ctr + A   Ctr + C   (Selects your whole document and copies it.)

3. Open Notepad (NOT WordPad), then Ctr + P  (Pastes your whole document in Notepad, killing all weird hidden Word formatting that is destined to mess you up later. Also known as the "Nuclear Option" in the Smashwords Guide.)

Now working in Notepad.

4. Find/Replace all em-dashes with --

Select an em-dash from your document and copy it, paste it in the Find box, then manually type the two hyphens in the Replace box. These will be replaced with real em-dashes later in JEdit, in such a way as to prevent weird 3/4 characters and the like from turning up. You might want to scroll through your document and make sure you don't spot any lingering em-dashes; but chances are, you got them. Also, while you're scrolling, look for empty box characters--just little squares. These are nasty symbols that cause glitches. If you find one, highlight it and copy it. Determine what it was supposed to be (in my case, an em-dash), and do a Find pasting in the box, Replace for what it was supposed to be.
5. Ctr + A    Ctr + C     Open JEdit, then   Ctr + P

Now working in JEdit.

6. F/R    ^(.+)$   with   <p>$1</p>    (This will put <p> and </p> symbols around each line)
7. F/R   …   with   &hellip;   (Copy that code from this page, including the semicolon.  DO NOT do this until you have replaced all three-dot ellipses with a single ellipses symbol--otherwise very weird stuff happens.)
8. F/R   --    with   &mdash; 
9. F/R  curly right  “  with  &ldquo;  and left  ”  with &rdquo;
10. F/R curly right  ‘  and left  ’  single quotes with  &lsquo;  and  &rsquo;

11. Save with an .html file extension. You will have to manually type .html after the file name.

12. Copy and paste the following at the top of the file, before any text:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
  <head>
    <style type="text/css">
      html, body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, ul, ol, dl, li, dt, dd, p, pre, table, th, td, tr { margin: 0; padding: 0em; }
           p
{
  text-indent: 1.5em;
  margin-bottom: 0.2em;
}

p.chapter
{
  text-indent: 0.1em;
  font-weight: bold;
  font-size: 1.5em; 
  page-break-before: always;
  margin-top: 5em;
  margin-bottom: 2em;
}

p.centered
{
 text-indent: 0em;
 font-weight: bold;
 font-size: 1.2em;
 margin-top: 1em;
 margin-bottom: 1em;
 text-align: center;
}
span.centered
{
  text-indent: 0em;
  text-align: center;
  font-size: 1.2em;
  font-weight: bold;
 margin-top: 1em;
 margin-bottom: 1em;
}
  </style>
  </head>
  <body>

13. Put </body> at the end, after all text.
14. F/R  <p>Chapter    with    <p class="chapter">Chapter    (Unless you have not named your chapters, "Chapter 1" etc.--in that case you probably can't use Find/Replace and will have to go through and manually replace the <p> in front of your chapter heading with <p class="chapter"> . <p class="chapter"> still should have the word chapter in it, even if you don't use the word in your chapter headings--in the code, it refers to a style.)
15. Put <p class="chapter"> in place of <p> in front of any chapter-like heading. You may want to do this for About the Author, for instance. Note that this heading style is not centered, though, so it's probably not the best choice for your title page.
16. F/R <p>section break symbols</p> with <p class="centered"><span class="centered">section break symbols</span></p>   (Except replace the phrase "section break symbols" with whatever you use as section break symbols, such as *** or ~~~, so it would look like <p>***</p> and <p class="centered"><span class="centered">***</p></span>)

Note that you must have both the p class="centered" and the span class="center" and corresponding closing code </p> and </span> to properly center text. Guido explains this if you want to know why.
17. Through your computer's start menu, open Documents and double-click the .html document you're working on to check how it looks as a webpage. It will automatically open as a new tab on the web, also long as your browser is capable of making tabs.
18. Apply heading formatting wherever else it needs to go, like the title page.

I've created additional p class="centered" + span class="centered" formats with different names (eg. p class="centeredsmall" + span class="centeredsmall") in order to have some additional options for centered text in various sizes, etc. Copy the original ones, paste after the originals, and change the names. You must make sure both the p style and the span style have identical codes and don't contradict each other. To mess with sizes, simply alter the number by font-size, for instance. I like to mess around with this, saving and then reloading the webpage that corresponds to the file, to see how it looks.

Once you're satisfied with all of that, you have your basic .html document. You can use this to upload to Amazon. ALWAYS look at the preview they offer, and be sure you like what you see.

In order to use this document on Smashwords and B&N:

Smashwords

Highlight the entire webpage of your document and copy it (Ctr + C). Paste that into a Word document. Make sure your Word document doesn't have any weird spacing or other default formatting that will annoy Smashwords. Use their guide if you aren't sure.
Save in .doc format. That's what you upload to Smashwords.

B&N

This is why you need Calibre.

1. Open Calibre.

There is a row of buttons at the top--we'll be using several of these.

2. Open your .html document in Calibre by clicking "Add Books."

3. Select your .html document in the book list, and click on "Edit Metadata."

Fill in the information (Title, Author, ISBN if you have one, etc.) and upload your cover.

4. Making sure your book is still selected, click on "Convert Books."

In the upper right hand corner, there's a drop down menu of format options.

You can convert to MOBI here if you want, and upload that to Amazon instead of the .html, and it will be faster--also, if Amazon throws up an error when you try to upload your .html, doing this can fix that.

For B&N, convert to EPUB.

5. Click on "Save to Disk" and select a folder in your documents you'll have no trouble finding later. Calibre will create a new folder within the one selected, most likely titled after your author name. Your book document is in there.

6. On B&N when you upload your book, browse into that author folder and choose the EPUB file of your book, and upload that.

Their preview will even show your cover, as long as you chose one when you were doing metadata. It's very cool.

ALWAYS CHECK THE PREVIEW.

You're done. I'll let you know if I run into any more problems, but it's my conviction that going through these steps will give you a properly formatted, glitch-free eBook.

If you have more complicated formatting, such as images to include, PLEASE read Guido Henkel's guide. I in no way have his expertise--I'm merely posting what I figured out after hours of trial and error, AND with his help. I emailed him twice with questions, which he graciously answered. So I owe almost all my formatting to him, and the rest to Smashwords.

Weekly eBook Sales Update.

Things are moving along!

The only fly in the ointment? Two readers have reported some formatting issues in two different Kindlebooks. I suspect it's the em-dashes, which some ereaders don't translate correctly. I am, at the moment, pretty stumped about how to fix this. The two readers both got their books from Smashwords (right Kathryn?) so I have no way of uploading the html version Guido Henkel teaches you how to make which is the only one that would address this, as far as I know. Smashwords only takes .doc files. So mostly at this point I'm crossing my fingers that the formatting won't be bad on most ereaders. On my laptop, using Amazon's Kindle for PC app, I am unable to reproduce the formatting bug. And I'm also unable to bring it up on my actual Kindle.

Another possibility would be to find/replace all my em-dashes and make them into "--" instead. I'm reluctant to do this without more of a sense of how pervasive the problem is, though. The "--" just doesn't look as professional to me. It's probably just me being anal. What do you all think?

Anyway, to the numbers!

Smashwords, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 5
Veronica in Paris = 2
The River and the Roses = 4

Amazon, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 4
Veronica in Paris = 4
The River and the Roses = 2

B&N, total sales by title:*
Broken Ones = 0
Veronica in Paris = 1
The River and the Roses = 0

*Keeping in mind that B&N has a reputation for being slow to report sales.

Total sales of all titles, just this last week: 14

Total sales since the beginning: 22

My sales have almost doubled since the first week. This is very encouraging! I've been submitting my books for bloggers to review. I'm hoping once the books get reviewed, they'll really start selling.

By the way, if you have a minute, something you can do for me is go to the sites of each book and select some of the tags associated with each. For instance, The River and the Roses has the tags: psychic, ghost, mystery, etc. The more times people click on these tags (signifying that they agree with them) the higher up in certain lists the books go.

For Amazon, US, go here. That should bring up my three ebooks. Select one and scroll down the page until you get to the tags. Click on a few of those. That simple!

For Amazon, UK, go here.

For B&N, go here. Edited to add: I can't seem to find tags on B&N--did you? I think maybe they don't do them. Please let me know--sometimes I don't see the same stuff because I published the book.

Smashwords doesn't do tags the same way.

Anyway, THANK YOU whether you have a chance to do that or not--just that fact that you are here, reading this blog, shows me that you are supporting me.

Please comment and let me know how your own pursuits are going!

epublishing your novel

I'm so excited. I've epublished my novel, Broken Ones, on Smashwords, and it will soon also become available electronically on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Clicking the "publish" button on Smashwords was SO COOL. Seriously. So cool!

So I had to do a fair amount of research to get it all done, and I thought I'd bring my findings here so that perhaps someone feeling as overwhelmed as I did yesterday can get it all in one place.

First of all, publish to at least these three retailers: Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.* Every retailer has their own format to follow for epublishing. This is annoying, and I suspect when we move out of this "wild west" era of epublishing, one of the things that will happen is standardization of formats. But in the meantime...

The simplest order to epublish is as follows (at least in my experience):

1. Publish to Smashwords
2. Publish to B&N
3. Publish to Amazon

Why? Because Smashwords has this wonderful free guide: Smashwords Style Guide. Warning: it is 73 pages long. Don't be intimidated, though, the first two dozen pages or so just tell you why using their guide is useful. The bulk of the instructions exist from around page 25ish to page 68, and there are a lot of images. And it is totally worth doing what they advise.

One thing I didn't think they made clear is that they won't take a .docx file. Only .doc, so "save as" .doc (it's listed as Word 97-2003) if you're using the latest Word.

Once you have your Smashwords formatted document, it is way easy to convert it to B&N and Amazon. Just remove the Smashwords copyright info and replace it with the appropriate info for whichever format you're doing. On the B&N site, you can upload the Word doc as is. For Amazon, you have to convert the file to html. Don't worry, all that means is "save as" a web page or as html, depending on what your program calls it.

Always look at the preview. When I first uploaded my file to Amazon I saw I had lost my paragraph indents. Then I realized I'd uploaded the .doc file, not the .html file. Because Amazon will take a .doc file, but the .html file keeps all that nice Smashwords formatting you created whereas for some reason it loses some from the .doc file.

Alternately, you can use Guide Henkel's guide to formatting, which provides you with step by step instructions for creating a clean, issue-free html file. Note that you cannot use this file for Smashwords. You definitely can for Amazon, and I didn't try for B&N. I ran into one problem with it, and commented on Guido's blog, and he responded within like, an hour. Really supportive. If you do decide to go with this guide to format your Amazon Kindle, be aware that the first line in the style sheet needs to be changed. Quoting Guido here from the email he sent me:

Simply change the first line in the style sheet

       html, body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, ul, ol, dl, li, dt, dd, p, pre, table, th, td, tr { margin: 0; padding: 0.1em; }

to this one

       html, body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, ul, ol, dl, li, dt, dd, p, pre, table, th, td, tr { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

and you will be fine. Kindle does not interpret the padding command properly and applies it only to the left side of the page.

When you're ready to upload your formatted book:

Have your bank account information handy when you are ready to upload your book. This will save you time and help you avoid annoying your significant other by asking him/her five different questions about your bank account. Believe me.

I created a paypal account for B&N because they pay you every time you earn $10 with paypal, versus every $75 if you choose to be paid by check.

A note or two about creating a cover:

You can do it yourself. I did. There are places online with free stock photos and illustrations, but in the end I went to dreamstime and set up an account, and paid $9.99 for 8 credits to buy a 4 credit image. So I paid, essentially, $5.00 for my cover and the right to use its photo commercially. I then used Paint to add the title and my name. I chose my photo carefully, as I wanted to combine the concept of "broken" with a sense of hope, and I also wanted a literal broken window since two windows get broken in the book. I also like to think the sunbeam could be a ghost image, but that might be stretching it. And I also carefully chose the font and how to format it. I suggest you look at your cover as a thumbnail in your file directory, because it will be that small (or nearly) in some of the directories Smashwords lists it in. If you can't read your name and title, start over.

You want an image that is minimum  800h X 600w because that's the minimum required by all three companies, I believe. At least two out of the three, for sure.

If the thought of creating your own cover gives you hives, you can, I'm told, go to DeviantArt and hire an artist on the cheap. One person told me it would cost around $35. One of my critiquing buddies is going to have his nephew do his cover. There are lots of possibilities.

Finally, some things to consider:

• Price: if you go by what epublishing guru J.A. Konrath says and does, price your ebook at $0.99 for promotional periods, then raise it to $2.99. Why? For one thing, on B&N and Amazon this makes a big difference in terms of your royalties. B&N Nookbooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99 earn 65% while anything outside of that range earns 40%. Amazon Kindlebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99 earn 70% while everything else earns 35%. So once you've got some momentum going on your sales and you have some five star book reviews, it may make sense to raise your price to $2.99, especially if your book is at least 65K words. Readers apparently judge value based on length a lot of the time. I've also read that some authors prefer not to list at $0.99 indefinitely because the $0.99 ebook attracts a certain kind of reader, and that kind of reader can be unpleasant. I wish I remembered which blog I read that on, because I'd link to it, but I don't, so do some searches for more information.

• Don't publish your book until you've given it revisions and a thorough edit. I mean, don't get me wrong, I probably missed some typos in my novel--I think I catch them all, and they still slip by me, masters of stealth that they are. But I think typos are forgivable. What hangs me up when I'm reading are things like passive voice, overuse of to be verbs, etc. And stories that confuse me, etc. So don't put your book out there until it's been through some beta-readers, etc. Broken Ones had a total of six beta-readers and I still caught way too many gerunds and to be verbs in my last edit. And try to eliminate every "there was" or "there were" you find. And to quote Stephen King, "The adverb is not your friend." Apparently a lot of crappy self-published ebooks exist out there. I believe that while some of these are selling, eventually the cream will rise to the top. Make sure yours is creamy.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has epublished or is considering doing so. Please comment and tell me a bit about your journey!

*ETA: I have been asked, "Why go through the trouble of reformatting to submit to Amazon when Smashwords automatically formats for Kindle (as well as many other formats)?" My answer: because at this time Smashwords does not place your book for sale with Amazon. That means if you want your book listed on Amazon for people to buy for their Kindles you must submit it separately to Amazon. Smashwords does list your book with B&N, but only if you make their Premium List, and I'm not going to take my chances.