Reborn

It's been almost two years since my last post.  I had given up on gaining any traction in the blogosphere at that time.  A lot of things have changed since then.  I have NOT returned to nanowrimo, and I do not support their efforts.  It was an experiment and I have concluded that we already have too many authors in the world, why dilute the pool any further?

I have collected many more rejections over the span of the last two years.  Most of them were mechanical automated responses which all insisted "please forgive the automated nature of this..."  Bull crap.  I have also received a few genuine rejections who offered their thoughts on this or that, but no thanks anyway.

My first novel was too long at 160,000 words.  Apparently, my second was also a bit long at 115,000 words.

My wife, tired of seeing me receive the rejections, talked me into self publishing.  It seemed a futile activity, and one that may spell the death of my hopes of ever picking up a sponsor, but I explored the option anyway and discovered three avenues of little financial risk: Kindle, Nook and CreateSpace.

I suppose I could just say ebook, for there are a great many more than just the two, but they are the major players, and I have concentrated on them.

First up was The Lost Art of Magic.  I formatted it for Kindle and found that I wasn't quite done, and went through several more revisions to refine my spelling and grammar.  I consider myself fortunate that all three formats allowed the author two choices: You can format it yourself using one of many formatting tools; You can format it in Word and submit a .doc file.

So I formatted in Word.  I actually was using Open Office, and immediately started finding spelling errors that I had missed before.  I also found that Open Office had some problems reading RTF files (produced by my primary writing tool) so I upgraded to Libre Office.  Since I planned to format a paperback as well, I added headings with the book title and page number.  Of course, the page number had to be on alternating left/right sides of the page.  I also wanted to suppress the heading on chapter headings.  Libre Office broke my document when I got too fancy with the headings.  It actually mangled my text by losing carriage returns which stuck paragraphs together.  I broke down and got the real Word which allowed me to have all the fancy headings I wanted.

So now I have a Kindle version on Amazon.  I since added The Mother of All Viruses and created Kindle, Nook and Paperback versions of both.

I am now represented on Amazon, and on Barnes and Noble and my facebook page has been gaining traction too.

The paperbacks of The Lost Art of Magic and The Mother of All Viruses each have their own websites.