Saturday, August 27, 2011

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Many years ago--never mind how many--I came across my first science fiction/fantasy magazine. It had been wrapped up with a lot of other magazines in stout wire and deposited at five AM in front of a drug store in San Francisco.  Now at that time I was a paper boy with wire cutters--our papers were delivered in wire bundles.
The covers of the pulp magazines back then were quite enticing to an eleven year old boy. I grabbed one stuffed it into my paper bag and read it later. Too my great disappointment the contents did not match the cover.  But hope springs eternal in a young boy’s breast so I tried it again next month. A strange thing happened. I got to liking the stories.  The third month I actual paid for the magazine.
Now decades later I have traveled with Conan, laughed with Fhfard and the Gray Mouser, Rode Jordan’s Wheel of Time, De Camped from one universe to the next, and kept an eye out for Boskone.  My children are grown now and I have misplaced my wire cutters but I have a computer. Maybe I can entice a few young men, and women, into a universe were the good guys win.  So different from ours 
PUBLISHING AN E-BOOK  PART  TWO

Everyone is familiar with Amazon and Kindle, but have you heard of Smashwords, and heard why should we use them?
Smashwords is a free service that converts your book to eleven different formats. These formats will fit on different e-readers. If you want to see which ones, go to the Smashwords Publishing web site and select any title. When you go to the book’s home page, scroll down and you will see the e-reader formats available.

TIME SAVER

You could go to all the different e-book readers, including the smart phones, and upload your book making sure it was formatted correctly for each reader--or you can let Smashwords do it. If Smashwords does it, they’ll charge a few cents per sold book. They will also check your formatting and distribute your book to all the different e-readers and sell it from their site. If you have no sales, you have no charges.
They also will supply an ISBN number which you need for Sony and Apple. Smashwords has a variety of ISBN payment plans including some that cost nothing. I picked one that costs just under ten dollars. And I pay for that number with the money received from the sale of my books.  

YOUR SALES TOOL

To publish on Smashwords you go to their site, choose PUBLISH at the top of the page and follow the directions. The only difference from Amazon is they ask for two summaries, one of 400 characters and another not to exceed 4000 characters. These summaries should be your sale tool for the book. I use the description on my query letter.  Again at the proper point they will ask you to both upload your cover and your manuscript.
In the next post we will talk about formatting


Sunday, August 14, 2011

How to publish an e-book

E-books
Are they the future of our business, a danger to book stores and publishing houses, or the world’s biggest slush pile?
The answer is--yes.
I have published three e-books. My motivation was very basic. It was not to make a million dollars, and it was not to retire in Tahiti. It was much simpler. I was looking over some old files in the computer one day and saw that one file consisted of a manuscript finished eleven years ago. It was book one of a trilogy. The trilogy itself had been completed six years ago.
It was just taking space in my computer, so I decided it should sit in someone else’s computer and maybe make me a few bucks. I began to look at e-publishing and this is what I found.
The eight hundred pound gorilla in the publishing world is Kindle. Amazon will not release the figures, but the industry’s best guess is, as of December 2010, that there were thirteen million Kindles in the hands of readers. And that doesn’t count this year’s sales. Their closest competitor is the Barnes and Noble, Nook. About five million of them have been sold. The Nook is more expensive, but the controls are easier to use. It will even display color--though how important that is for novels is a good question. Its battery life is not nowhere near as good as Kindle’s.
World wide, I’m told Sony is the leader, but in this country they are a small player. In fact Apple is bigger.
The Apple I-pad has I-Books, just as the I-Pod has I-Tunes. To get your book in the Apple, or Sony catalog, you need an ISBN number (more on that later). Strange to say that you can download a Kindle app to the I-pad which allows you to bypass Apple’s requirements and go direct to Amazon. This may change. As of the first week of August, Apple and Amazon are in an argument.
When it is about E-books, it always seems to come back to Amazon. To e-publish on Kindle you must download Kindle for PC (OR Mac) and set up an account. This is very important and basic because you will need to download some instruction books that are both free and available. Once you have signed in you go to FORUMSKINDLEDIRECTPUBLISHING.COM and choose bookshelf. On the right side of the page you will see a button labeled New Title. Click on that and they will walk you through the process. At the proper place they will ask you to upload your cover and then manuscript just as you would attachments.
MORE NEXT WEEK

Thursday, August 11, 2011

E-BOOKS

I will be posting info on E-books shortly. Check back on this blog frequently.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

PROOFREADING IN THE E-BOOK WORLD

from. . . Walter J Golden, author of the three books in the Seamount Series: Blue Glory; The Queen In Silver & Black; and Red Devlin.

My editor, Norma Jeanne Strobel, and I are engaged in one of the most frustrating, and necessary tasks known to a writer--proofreading. The middle of next month, or maybe even sooner, we will be e-publishing our first adventure/dectective book in a new series.

The title of the book is Carolina Nights. I will run this book through two critique groups, and get together with my editor for careful proofing. I read it from the computer and she follows on a hard copy. However, no matter how carefully we think we have proofed it, it is amazing that after all our attention to detail, our readers will still pick up errors.

Everyone knows that in good writing, the most important thought of a sentence is too go last. At one time, maybe a year ago, I realized I needed to move a prepositional clause from the end to the beginning of the sentence. Apparently I changed it so that it would now start with the prepositional clause; however I forgot to take the clause off the back end. We now had a sentence that started and finished with the same three words. Not to worry. We caught it and got that one fixed.

Another time, a mystery revolved around the word “through”. It sat there, between two sentences and seemed to have relationship to neither. Once there was probably a complete sentence surrounding that word, but now, like the gates of a city standing in the middle of a flat desert with no sign of a city, it becomes an intriguing mystery. What was it attached to?

But the really sad part is that no matter how many writers peruse the manuscript, or how careful we are in our proofing, after we publish, a devoted reader will still be able to find an error--or two--or three in the book -- and will not hesitate to bring it to our attention!

In our last book, it was dining and dinning room.



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Tuesday, August 9, 2011

HOT -- JUST OFF THE PRESS -- NEWS ABOUT MY EBOOKS

JUST GOT WORD THAT ALL THREE OF MY SEAMOUNT SERIES BOOKS are now publisshed to Kindle, Nook, Sony, all Apples devices including the IPad, I phone, and I pod and are ready for you to purchase at the all time low price of $2.99.

The last book is Red Devlin -- that is, last for now. If the series is well-accepted, I am ready to write book five, which promises to be the best one yet. Don't worry about reading them in order. You could always start with Red Devlin, and if you really enjoy it, go back to Blue Glory, book one, and then to The Queen in Silver & Black, book two.
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Hope to read your review of the book when you finish it. We authors are really eager for those reviews!!!

Monday, August 8, 2011

SEAMOUNT SERIES COMPLETE WITH THREE BOOKS

Red Devlin, book three in the Seamout Series is now published as an ebook on Amazon.com/Kindle and Smashwords.com where it will soon be forwarded to the Barnes & Noble Nook, and all the Apple Devices. The first two books of the series are: Blue Glory & The Queen In Silver & Black.

To purthase the books, just go to either Amazon.com and select Kindle books, or Smashwords.com and enter Seamount in the search box.

Here is a new series for all you Fantasy lovers. Happy reading.