SIGNING KINDLES AND OTHER STUFF

Writers who are currently converting their books to Kindle, the primo E Book reader, can now sign those books through a site called Kindlegraph. Today I signed a copy of Dream Walker for a reader through the site. This is a cool concept. Thanks to Ronda del Bocchio for sending me the link. She's a great gal and is always on the ball where online sites are concerned and so sharing.

I'm almost finished with my second book conversion, but haven't done much about the cover yet. Have a photo I got from a great site that might be useful for many of you. For photos at a very inexpensive price, go to dreamstime. Just type in the subject matter and I'll bet they have photos. I typed in first ghost towns, but needed to narrow that down when so many began to pop up, so I put in the name of the town from my book, Virginia City, Montana. I was able to download a perfect photo to fit my next book, Montana Promises. Of course, I'm tweaking it a bit, but I was amazed at the huge amount of photos in their stock and the low cost. Hint: download the smallest photo. I took the medium and it's rather large for a book cover, though it's fixable.

While I work I'm taking notes for teaching my first workshop on converting and formatting your book to Kindle. No matter how many tutorials there are out there, when we actually get to work, we learn a lot of little things that make the work much easier and quicker.

I just looked down at my temperature and it's 102. I gotta tell you folks, we don't normally have this type of summer in Northwest Arkansas. Further South, maybe, but we'll usually hit the mid 90s a few times separated by cooler weather, then maybe 100, but not often. The last time we had this hot a summer was 1980 the year my grandson was born. My poor daughter was miserable. Who ever heard of having an air conditioner out in the country?

Okay, back to writing. It's the wrong spacing that messes up the Kindle formatting worse than anything else, and that is seldom mentioned in tutorials. Probably the best tutorial put out comes from the Kindle people who finally got on the ball and quit saying, "Oh, it's easy. Just upload a Word document to KDP." Uh huh No sir, it'll never get past the first try.

In their latest Newsletter they included a complete tutorial for formatting and uploading to Kindle. It says just about the same thing as what I'm developing from doing it myself using the best parts of tutorials plus advice from a couple of authors who've done it a few times. It's been a tough learning curve, but I think I have it now. Time will tell as I finish and upload Montana Promises, the first of a stand-alone Montana trilogy that begins before the end of the Civil War and finishes in the late 1870s when the cattle barons ruled in Montana.

Amazing how in reading these books for the first time since they were published from 1994 through 2001, I constantly say," I don't remember writing that." Or, on some days, "How could I have written that?" and changing it quickly. My writing has continued to improve over the years, even while I was being published by Topaz and Dorchester in New York. Won't go there again, either. But that's a story for another day.

I'm feeling very comfortable in this new E Book world and hope to continue to self-publish and submit to E Book publishers, then promote online. I'm tired, folks, but can't stop writing, so I'm making this choice willingly, even though I don't know what I'm doing a lot of the time. It's coming.