Naima's Published Titles

Monday, June 20, 2011

Success!

I have my first short story packaged and uploaded to http://kdp.amazon.com, ready to publish! Daniele Serra (www.multigrade.com) designed the cover art. The whole time I was complaining about the difficulty of packaging a story for Kindle, I just needed to follow the tutorial I'd bought to the very end. The tutorial is available at http://content.taleist.com and was created by Steven Lewis, a prolific and successful author/publisher of Kindle books. It is a peculiar habit of mine to think, "This task is instinctive. I can wing it." This usually leads to frustration; you would think I'd learn. The tutorial is very detailed and thorough, with downloadable exercises and demo videos. I used the html editing tool Steve uses for PC; a 30-day trial is available at http://www.e-texteditor.com/. It's better than the one I was using, because it opens the web preview in a pane next to your html pane and any changes you make to the html immediately show up in the web preview pane. The tutorial takes you from preparing your Word document for formatting, through packaging your e-book using Amazon's free mobi-creator software, to viewing it in your Kindle. Let me tell you, the moment I saw my story in my Kindle I did a happy dance in my computer chair! I even have the cover art in my Kindle! The one thing I want to do before publishing is find out how to put my short story in the Kindle Singles marketplace, so that shoppers looking for Singles can find it when browsing. I have two more short stories ready to format and publish after this. So I'm on my way!

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations! So happy for you! Pretty soon you'll have an entire library of eBooks available for the Kindle!

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  2. What a lovely vision! Thanks for the congrats!

    ~Naima

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