My first book is for sale..... Finally

As of today I am going to make an effort to Blog on a regular basis. That being said since I have not been blogging I will catch you up to speed. I do in fact finally have my book for sale. I decided to self publish with CreateSpace. My experience with them has been overall pretty positive with the exception with the time it takes to get anything done. However for quality and communication I do give them an A. 

Now the extra service I paid for was the Cover Creator. I think a professionally designed cover is very important. I feel they delivered based on my specifications. I kind of wish I went with white font instead of gold but that would be my fault not theirs. 

What I wanted to mention was converting the book from print to an ebook. They do offer this service for the low price of $69.00. I would have paid that with a smile on my face but the time it was going to take for it to be "Kindle Ready" was 3-4 weeks. I had read so many articles about the fact that during the conversion process a manuscript can get pretty ugly. The spacing and indents get pretty messed up. After reading through the kindle direct site I realized I could preview it before I offered it for sale so I decided to give it a go. I thought based on things I had read that I should use Calibre for conversion to mobi. It actually wasn't necessary but I am glad I did because it created a nice file with all my book files in one folder and saved it on my computer. I pulled my image from my Calibre file (Which it found on its own through metadata) and my original ms word manuscript. Presto I have an ebook. Now I think the fact that my manuscript was reformatted to perfection by CreateSpace was how I was able to avoid all of the problems people encounter. My spacing was perfect and my chapter headers came out great. Kindle told me in 12 hours I will have an ebook. This morning when I woke up and checked I do in fact have an ebook for sale. :)

Since I had a pretty easy time with Kindle I figured I would upload to Kobo Writing Life. KWL converts files to epub. This conversion had a few problems but nothing I couldn't live with or fix. With KWL you can actually edit in the preview. I had to re-center my chapter headers and I changed the font. I lost all of my paragraph indents but honestly I don't mind too much. I could have spent hours fixing that but I didn't (because I can barely use word, so everything program related takes me forever!) Everything seemed to run smooth until I had to set up my depository account info. Apparently there is an issue with me using a credit union instead of a major bank. I'm not positive that's the problem but I can't see what else it could be. I have to look into this today.

So now what do I do? I market the crap out of it. I am not the most organized person. I don't have a fool-proof plan. But I do have a desire and a passion so I'm going to fly by the seat of my pants and see if I can get my book out there. 

I will post my Marketing efforts as they come. I have ordered 100 copies myself to use mainly as marketing tools. My mom however wants me to send her a dozen right away(signed of course) to sell to her friends. She is proud as a peacock of my accomplishment. She actually read a not so perfect draft version of my manuscript and she called to ask me when book two will be complete. I laughed because I'm only on Chapter 2.