What’s Your Week Been Like?

Busy, busy week here.

Started the week by promising to do a review for David Gaughran’s new book on self-publishing Let’s Get Digital. That meant I had to read it and write it before Thursday. That in itself was no problem as I’m a very fast reader and a reasonably fast writer when I know what I want to say. Read it in two nights, wrote and published it on the third.

Also, got the bug to publish my first short story, The Missing Wizard. Several reasons really. First, after readings David’s book and the section of self-publishing I was curious to see how difficult it was to get a manuscript ready to pass through the Smashwords gauntlet for publication. For those that haven’t read David’s book, although you should if you have any interest in self-publishing at all, Smashwords runs a Microsoft Word .doc file through its converter program, which eventually spits out the various ebook formats for publishing on Kindle, iBook, the Nook, and other formats. If you have a single critical error in the manuscript, you get nothing and have to start over again.

Anyway, I figured that learning how to self-publish through them would go much better if I used a short story instead of an entire 340+ page novel. Since I was happy with how The Missing Wizard came out, it became my test subject. I carefully followed all the instructions in the Smashwords Style Guide and am proud to say it went through completely error free on the very first attempt. Yeah for me!

Course, there were a host of other steps I needed to do to make that happen. Had to design a good cover first. I had found a nice image called Fantasy Woman on Dreamstime.com, but in order to get the watermark free version I had to buy some credits. Then I had to add text to the image, manipulate it to the right size, format it for uploading, and do all the other sundry details.

Then I had to run the story through MS Word and format it correctly. Since I detest using Word normally, I wasn’t looking forward to this part, but I did it and learned a few things along the way. Should make it easier to do additional story formatting in the future, as well as learning that Words grammar checker is much better then the one in my current writing software. It found a few items that were ignored by the other program, which was great. The better my writing reads the more likely people will want more.

Next, I had to sign up for Smashwords, then Paypal, then connect the two, then connect Paypal to my bank account, and well, you get the picture. A lot of site swapping and data entry so that the business part of publishing could go smoothly.

Finally, one of the main decisions I had to make was whether to charge anyone to read it. There’s a lot of different opinions on where people should price their work. For myself, I have no objection to free, but I’m here because I think I have stories to tell that I believe people will pay to read. Also, I incurred some costs to post The Missing Wizard to Smashwords, starting with my time and sweat equity in the story, then it cost me about $10 to license the cover image, another $10 for the ISBN number so it could be posted on iBooks, Kindle, and other sites that require it, a bit of this domain fee, and a few other things I’ve forgotten about. The end result is I priced The Missing Wizard at 99 cents.

Anyway, the story is posted and trickling out to Amazon, iBooks, the Nook, and other sites over the next week or so. It’ll be exciting to see a new entry by me on Amazon. It’s been 15 years since my second programming book was released. Jeesh, how time flies.

In addition to all the above, I installed Mac OS X Lion onto two computers, did a little writing on another short story, and have nearly completed the next chapter in An Empire Forgotten. The action is getting fast and furious and two sections I’d planned to include into chapter 24 have now slipped into chapter 25 because I have so much to say. Novel creep, who’d have thunk it?

A busy, busy week. But very productive and successful from my viewpoint.

So, how’s your week going?

Image: This weeks image was created by Alex Toth, a highly respected and influential artist. I particularly love his deceptively simple b&w images that carried more impact and emotion than 10 other artists of the day. I see his influences in Frank Miller (300) and Mike Mignola’s (Hellboy) artwork.