Going Indie

Of all the weeks to choose to try to launch my first baby book – my collection of four short stories – I choose the week that Amazon announces their new line of Kindles. This is big news. The entry level eReader from Amazon is now $79.00. Most techies were most jazzed by the color tablet, the Amazon Fire, which came in at a remarkably low $199. But the real news was at the lower end of the scale. With this eReader at this price point, millions of people will now be able to afford the leap into eBooks.

I thought perhaps the idea that I was getting into publishing for the first time would be big news, but Jeff Bezos took the wind right out of my sails.

On the other hand, over at the Passive Guy's blog, he's reporting that people who buy tablets spend more money online. Well, duh! Tablets cost more so the people who buy them have more spendable income (present company excluded –I own a boat. Nuff said).

So, there I was reading the Smashwords Style Guide and the Calibre Manual and trying to figure out this formatting stuff, but I kept switching back and forth to the bloggers who were live-blogging from the Amazon press conference.  Once a geek, always a geek.

Meanwhile I have decided to include two short stories in my mini-collection that I wrote when I was in graduate school.  These stories were part of my masters thesis. I only had paper copies of them and I had to scan them.  One of them is the original story wherein I started to develop the character of Seychelle Sullivan who later was the protagonist in my first four novels. Looking back at that story written in 1992, almost 20 years ago, I came to one conclusion. It was horrible.

There is a positive side to that.  I've improved as a writer in a couple of decades.  After significant rewriting, the story made it into the anthology.

Then I couldn't help but switch to Bob Mayer's blog on The Perfect Storm of Publishing.  This is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the future of books and publishing.

After reading that blog, I returned to my first attempt at formatting my mini-anthology and when I loaded the example file onto my Kindle, it was a disaster. No wonder in this new age of direct publishing there is an entire new eco-system sprouting of folks who will do this formatting stuff for you. I'm starting to realize that the instructions differ depending on whether you are using a Windows machine or a Mac.

I'd wanted to get my first little book up and ready to go before this blog post was due, but thanks to Jeff Bezos, the Passive Guy, Bob Mayer, Smashwords and Calibre, it may not happen until the end of the weekend.  But when it does, I will happily add one of those nice little clickble BUY ME buttons at the bottom of this post.

This is my first attempt at uploading and formatting, etc.  The anthology of four short stories will be called Sea Bitch: Four Tales of Nautical Noir. I've designed my own cover for this one. At the end, I have included almost 50 pages of the new novel, Circle of Bones. If I can master this formatting stuff, it will be live by Saturday.

I'm going Indie.

Fair winds!!

Christine

 

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