Tuesday 24 July 2012

One Step Closer to Kindle Publication

Good morning folks ...

And what a beautiful day to wake up to. The sun is shining for the second day in a row down here, which no doubt means the powers that be will be considering another 'hose pipe ban' before long.

I have just spent the best part of three days re-formatting the manuscript for Encounters, making it e-reader friendly for it's launch on to the Kindle platform in the not too distant future. And what an experience that was!


I don't think that I could have done it without the help of one person in particular, David Robinson. I'm afraid he became my 'Go to Guru' where this project was concerned, although, knowing his aversion to poetry, I did try to keep from pestering him too much.

He has written an excellent guide on the subject, E-book Formatting & Publishing on the Kindle, which I found to be an invaluable resource as I worked my way through the process.  It is written in a way that makes the process easy to follow and uses screen capture images to highlight specific areas that need attention.

Whilst I'm not a complete novice on the computer, I'm not an expert either, so I found his explanations on how to use WORD to set up the document correctly, very informative and helpful.

Although formatting poetry can raise some specific issues and is still time consuming, I was able to adapt and apply the rules quite easily. Once I'd mastered the intricacies of 'WORD' that is.

Encounters will be available on Kindle sometime in August.

There are also plans to make it available to other e-reader devices via Smashwords, but as they have slightly different manuscript requirements, I shall no doubt be availing my self of David's other book E-book Formatting and Publishing on Smashwords, just to make sure I get it right.





2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the plug, Laurie, and I'm looking out for Close Encounters. I'm out with me binoculars every night :)

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  2. My pleasure David, both you and the e-books have been an enormous help. ;@))

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