Newbie Mistakes

So I've made a couple of newbie mistakes. Firstly, the way I uploaded Once Upon a Time Ferret to the Kindle site and stepped back from it. It felt like saying goodbye to an old friend for the last time - here was a book I've worked on for years and years and there I was putting it out into the world for all to see. I would be spending no more time proof-reading or editing it, so my thinking was 'just let it go'.

I had a look at it today and was shocked. Word 2010 seems to have a bug when saving a document to HTML  format. Even though the pages look fine in Word, when viewed on a Kindle or in a web browser the document had a blank line between each paragraph.

Took me a while to figure out. I'd used the 'remove extra space before and after' button on the ribbon. What I hadn't done was to right-click on the Normal Style and modify the paragraph settings there too. Once this was done I saved it again and all was well.

The point is, I should have spent more time checking the 'Kindled' version of my Word document.

The other mistake I made was doing my cover art myself. I spent a bit of time yesterday comparing my cover art with that of other e-books. While I don't think it was as bad as some I saw, it didn't look great next to the professionally made ones.

I can't afford to pay someone to make a cover for me, so I downloaded GIMP (it's a free image editor like Photoshop) and spent all evening yesterday and most of this morning creating a new cover. It's cartoonish, it has a big, striking picture on it, and I put a layer of red cube things in the background. I added text, ran it through a few filters, and by version 8.0 I had something that's an improvement on the last one.

I still think I could do better, but I've only got a laptop to work on and it's not easy drawing with a touchpad.

I'll be interested to see if there is any rise in sales.