E-BOOKS PART FOUR

The cover is a problem. I don’t know a pixy from a pixel.  I have found the best way to handle the cover is to have a friend who knows photo shop. Show up Saturday morning at their place with a six pack of beer or, depending on the person, a bottle of white wine--Barefoot wine works pretty well. With a little fast pouring and faster talking you can get them to help you. Now I know nothing about photo shop, but I do know it never works the first time and so it becomes a point of honor for your friend to show you they can do it. This allows you to smile, take your time, finish the wine, and continue to write. Of course you can hire someone online to do it but, for most of us, I would not recommend it. They will charge more than you will probably make.

An Inconvenient Truth

Most of us hope to make a large amount of money writing. Oh we don’t necessarily want to be the next Stephen King. Most of us would settle for being the next Robert Parker. Yet most of us will end up being the next Ed Dweker. Never heard of Ed? See what I mean?

Publishing an e-book is not like having a book published. It is more like owning your own bookstore.

Unfortunately your bookstore is hidden on a street no one has ever heard of. There is no sign outside and the book is in a drawer in the back room. You can guess how many you are going to sell. You need to let people know you have a book. And you need more than one book so that people who do find you will keep coming back. A series with the same hero works very well. It would be good if you have a famous character hang out at your store. Someone like Stephanie Plum, Harry Dresden, Reacher, or Spencer. Then people will drop in to see what is going on and leave with one of your books.

The Name of the Game is Reviews

For some reason your friends and family will not be rushing to buy the book. Maybe they are still upset about the white wine and the cover. Not even other authors. I am running at fifty percent as to the people who suggested that I buy their book and they would buy mine. Then we would write each other reviews. I have written twice as many reviews as I have gotten

And reviews are important. If you look at the best sellers in the Kindle store you will find that some have several hundred reviews. That seems to be what a best seller needs.

E BOOKS PART THREE

The biggest problem with uploading the book on Amazon--or any e-reader--is formatting. The industry is new, and the desired formatting changes by the month. Two years ago they wouldn’t accept smart quotes. They do today. For formatting you must remember that the pilcrow is your friend. The pilcrow is that backward P in the middle of the Microsoft Word ribbon. It shows you the formatting in your manuscript, such as spaces between sentences, page breaks, and use of both the tab and enter key.

THINGS TO AVOID

Tabs are a big no-no. To get rid of them use Find and Replace. Select More at the bottom left, then select Special, and then Tab. The symbol for tab will be shown in Find. Put nothing in Replace and chose Replace all.

Another area to look at is the number of spaces between sentences. Many of us were trained to use two spaces between sentences. Nowadays they want just one. Again find and replace will help. Go to the find field, hit the space bar twice. Then using the mouse, go to the replace field and hit the space bar once. You won’t see anything, but the computer will know what to do.

By using paragraph from the center of the ribbon you can change the indent from five to two or three. I would not recommend more than three. The e-readers allow the reader to change font size and on some of the larger fonts you will find that five spaces take you half way across the screen.

When all else fails

The best and most up to date help in formatting will be contained in the free books available on Kindle. Publishing on Kindle with Kindle Direst Publishing and Smashword Style Guide By Mark Coker are both free and can be downloaded to the computer from the Kindle store. You do not need a Kindle, However make sure those books are current. Anything published two years ago is of little use.

THIS IS A REQUIREMENT, NOT A SUGGESTION!

Studying the books are a must! This is why you need to install Kindle on your computer. You need these free books. Little things will be mentioned like, no strange fonts and no fonts larger than 19. No page numbers or headers and footers are to be used, page breaks and the number of space before each chapter number/ Also how to use an index.

MORE NEXT WEEK

hey

URL FOR E-READERS OTHER THAN KINDLE

http://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=SEAMOUNT

THIS IS FOR THE SEAMOUNT SERIES FOR KINDLE OWNERS

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=seamount&x=14&y=21