After an RWA chapter meeting and over a glass of wine, networking with other authors has to be one of my favorite pastimes. This happened to me recently and I can’t
tell you how much it helped me at the time.
professional formatter who has taken all my books, formatted them and made them
look real pretty. We worked well together, and I’ve always appreciated his
professional way of doing business.
so I could publish it on Amazon. I’d slap the book into their Select Program
and “Bob’s yer Uncle”. The book would be finished and I’d move on to the next
one.
books out of the Select option and distribute them in as many places as I can
(more about that on one of my next posts). So, just as I make up my mind this
needs to be done, my formatter has some kind of a personal crisis and he’s no longer
available for almost a month……no, no, nooooo!
While I’m hyperventilating from being
overwhelmed with all these books that need to be reformatted into epubs and
pdf’s, the networking happens. Drinking wine with another author who
casually mentions a site she uses called Pressbook ( http://pressbooks.com/ )
Her words went something like: “It’s a template. I just slap my chapters into
their slots, add in the front and back matter, and bingo – pay the ten bucks
and export the sweetest mobi, pdf and epub files you can imagine. Easy-shmeasy!”
(okay – mostly my words!!) No matter – what does matter is that this could be
the answer to my dilemma. And boy did I need help.
out the Pressbook site. I started to upload a book and found it simple to do. But like everything new, it took some practise. In my follow-up blog, I’ll tell
you about some of the problems I ran into. It might help you solve similar mistakes if
you find yourself in the same situation.
What I can tell you is that using this tool has given me back
control. You see, once my book was sent to the old formatter, I had to
rely on him so I could publish to Amazon. Truthfully, once I decided on this new
option of sharing the work everywhere, I had automatically taken it for granted that he would do all the epubs and… supply me with
Smashwords files also. Dream on!
when:
They have a lot of other customers who demand
their time and energy
They dislike working on files for Smashwords
They have their own lives that can kick in and
take them away.
myself. I’ve learned a huge lesson here. Never let the control be taken from
you. You can hire others of course, but always have a backup.
of an assistant, my books will eventually be formatted and distributed. I just pray that
after all this work – it pays off!!!
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