Okay, so it’s been about two weeks since I published my eBook. I wanted to do a quick check-in to let you know what my experience has been with Smashwords so far: **Premium Status: **Once you get into Smashwords’ premium catalog, your book can be distributed to their partner retailers, such as Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, etc. This approval process only took about a day, which made me really happy....
Last week, I read Rotting Apricot aloud multiple times and polished the formatting. I learned a ton of awesome Microsoft Word search operators and tricks, like how to find every single italicized thing in a document. I also attended a very helpful Seattle Writes self-editing course led by Beth Jusino, a local freelance editor, book marketer, and former literary agent. She’s coached authors on multiple publishing trails, including traditional, digital self-pub, and print-on-demand....
My eyes hurt. I’ve been scrolling past this formatting character called the “pilcrow” for a very long time. When I close my eyes, I can see pilcrow afterimages. ¶ ¶ I feel like all SpongeBob stills are slightly eerie. The Smashwords Style Guide by Mark Coker has been my constant companion this week. Here are just some of the things I’ve been obsessing over: Hidden words and formatting Reflowability – the way words automatically wrap around the screens on your gadgets Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes (I’m glad that Emily Dickinson didn’t have to fuss over Unicode or special character menus....
Oh snap. This is a the moment I’ve been eagerly awaiting. Cover designs! Those little thumbnails that compel you to read stuff on the Internet. The incomparable Erin Moon used her graphic design magic to come up with several mockups for Rotting Apricot. I’m pretty much sold on the first design here, but we thought it would be fun to share the other ideas too! I love the traditional book cover textures used here – the leather and fabric are really ironic, considering that this will be a digital publication about the maintenance of paper books....
I’m working on something new! No, not self-cloning. Well, kind of. Next month, I’ll be publishing an eBook for the first time. And then I’m going to enter it into this fancy Seattle Writes contest, hosted by the Seattle Public Library and Smashwords. By October, you should be able to enjoy my super spookeh tale of killer mold spores in my forthcoming eBook, “Rotting Apricot.” Cue the Smoke Machines My fiction has been laying around unread in dark recesses of hard drives for too long....