I knew I didn’t have time for this. I should have listened to myself.
After all, I have songs to finish, novels to finish, and just plain blogging to do. But what do I do instead? Work on publishing my short story.
Every aspect of this is laborious. Formatting the ebook. Creating a cover. Making sure the cover looks good once you format it in the ebook file. I mean, dang. I have 9 versions of this cover. Publishers do earn their pay, guys. Here’s the final version: I ended up using a picture that I took myself.
I went to five different stores before I found a metal funnel. They’re all plastic these days. And it still wasn’t the type of funnel I wanted, so I had to make do.
So, I’m taking this slow, just working on it when I feel like it. I’m almost done. For some reason, the cover’s not shrinking up well in the actual book file. I think it’s because the graphic program I’m using doesn’t convert to jpeg natively (huh???), so I’m converting it to png, then to jpeg in another program. I seem to be suffering from a loss of quality during these conversions. Frustrating.
When I do have it ready, I have to decide whether to take advantage of Amazon’s KDP Select program or not. From what I understand, authors can make some serious money doing this. The big drawback is you have to give Amazon an exclusive for 3 whole months. Not sure I want to do that.
Decisions, decisions!
The learning curve’s got to be huge. I’m planning on putting a collection of shorts up, too, but I wimped out on creating a cover myself. I’m letting my sister-in-law handle that.
Formatting, as far as I can tell, is going to be an absolute bear!
I found a link which has step-by-step instructions! Here it is:
http://cameronchapman.com/ebook-formatting-the-easy-way.htm
I have followed these steps many times now! One thing you should do in addition to what he recommends is to click the option to keep the cover art aspect ratio on the 2nd to last tab. In the Calibre section.
The all important question: will I be able to buy it on Nook once it’s out?
That’s the thing. KDP would force me to keep it exclusive to Amazon for 90 days. I’d rather not do that, but it probably will take me a little time to get it uploaded in various places.
There is so much to learn. This month I put out my first self published free read and there was so much to take in and do. It is an amazing experience and I look forward to doing more self publishing…
I did that a while back and didn’t bother with a cover. It could probably do with some reformatting.