Authors Electric

I've been self-publishing for over eleven years now. 😲 For most of that time, most of my books have been exclusive to Amazon, first as ebooks, and then as paperbacks too. I did try one or two books on Nook, but never seemed to sell much and, frankly, couldn't be bothered to put in the amount of work necessary to publish across the board, even with the help of Draft2Digital. But this year, I decided to give it a go. And it has been just as much hard graft as I feared. Although I don't suppose I'm telling most of you anything you don't already know. Sorry, Grandma. Sorry, Grandad.  D2D ebooks aren't too bad. After some experimentation and the usual hiccups, I find that transforming a book already published as a ebook with Amazon is fairly straightforward. You make the whole book a long, uninterrupted stream of text, except for chapter ends, where you insert nothing more fancy than a page-break. Draft2Digital advise you to use Word's 'Heading 1' for a...

Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits - oops no, hares hares hares as it's 1st March. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been driven as mad as two March hares, beginning the process of putting my Kindle ebooks on all the non-Amazon platforms I can find. Encouraged by other AE luminaries, I’ve gone with Draft 2 Digital for most of this, and I can announce that my Kindle comedy novel LYDIA BENNET'S BLOG is now on Nook, Kobo, PageFoundry's Inktera, Scribd and Tolino (links below). However the process hasn’t been totally straightforward even with D2D who have a simple to follow method, and Apple/iTunes is a whole other vale of tears not yet put behind me. My AE colleagues have had to put up with my howls of anguish on Facebook and I don’t see why any of you should be spared so here is the tale of occasional woe. Lydia Bennet, shameless as ever, now more widely available. So I scrubbed and polished a nice clean version of LLB in Word. D2D supply front and back matter, but I adde...

          And not only available on Amazon , but also on Barnes & Noble's Nook , and on Kobo too, thanks to Draft2Digital , which is a great boon to the self-publisher.           Nice ad, eh? It was put together by my brother, Andrew, from one of his own illustrations for the book. This one:-             At the moment we're battling through the problems of turning The Wolf's Footprint into a paper book, with Createspace. The pictures in the paperback will probably be black and white, because of the expense of colour-printing - but in the e-book they can be as colourful as we like.            I asked the artist who produced the illustrations, Andrew Price, about the size the images needed to be. He said that the images in Wolf's Footprint are 1563 pixels wide by 2500 pixels high. This is a good s...