My Thoughts · Technology · Writing

Moving Parts of Publishing an E-book!

Moving parts

Moving parts of publishing an e-book—so many for sure! My new e-book, Hair on Fire: A Heartwarming & Humorous Christmas Memoir, has made it through the ringer, available now! This week I struggled with the process and succeeded. Let me share it with you!

Eagerly on Monday, first, I created the new e-book space on KDP, an affiliate of Amazon. I filled in all the required information, which I prepared for a couple of days ahead of time. Lots of research goes into launching a new book for keywords and categories. When a customer searches on Amazon, their search engines use keywords and book categories to find the book—super important for the sales of a book!

Then I uploaded the manuscript to KDP, excited I was finally there. Anticipation about this day had hovered over me for weeks. KDP has an online previewer, thank God! First, I realized I had the Copyright page in the wrong place—after the Table of Contents, not before it. So, in Vellum, the program I use to create my books, I moved it forward one page, but then had to upload the document again. Whew! All these moving parts!

Then, I have several pictures in the book and the placement in Vellum wasn’t true to size. So, I resized and resized and resized, going back and forth several times between KDP and Vellum. Finally, it looked good.

On Tuesday morning, I asked my book coach and group about using my ex-husband’s name in my book. None of what I wrote about him was derogatory, but I have become super cautious about using people’s names.

The solutions they offered: change his name or call him and ask permission. I haven’t talked to him in over forty years, so calling was out of the question. My husband, Lin, had offered the same advice while we discussed this in the hot tub on Monday night.

So somehow, while I was resizing the pictures, I forgot about changing his name in the revisions Tuesday night. Good thing I brought it up to my book coach.

On Wednesday morning, I knew I had to change my first husband’s name. I researched safe names to use for men characters in a book and came up with Alex. Lin came upstairs to my computer, and I told him what I was doing. He came up with a great idea: use a Christmas name. So, I researched Christmas names: Joseph, Nicholas, Rudolph, etc. Our decision: Rudolph!

So that ended the saga! I uploaded the new version of the e-book on Wednesday afternoon and it was ready for purchase shortly!

Finally, I’m waiting for the final cover of the print copy with the description, my picture and brief biography and the ISBN number. Hopefully, it will go smoothly! You never know! Moving parts!!

Did you know all the moving parts of publishing a book? If so, what was your experience?


~Jump in on my Book Launch special next week. From Wednesday, September 13 – Sunday, September 17, Hair on Fire: A Heartwarming & Humorous Christmas Memoir will be FREE on Amazon. Click here!

Download new launch: Hair on Fire. Moving parts
Blogging · Blogs · My Thoughts · Technology

Wondering What’s Going On?

Wondering What's Going On?
Wondering What’s Going On?

Are you wondering what I’m doing? Normally, I write my blog post weekly, but something changed this week. As of yesterday, I joined the “Ultimate Blog Challenge” and will post a blog every day in November—yes, daily! I plan the post to be shorter, and I have created an outline of my topics:

TOPICS

  • Week 1 – A variety of writing topics
  • Week 2 – Where my new book, Coronavirus Reflections: Bitter or Better? came from
  • Week 3 – Gratitude topics for Thanksgiving week
  • Week 4 – Feature some of my poetry and future poetry books
  • Week 5 – Facing the end of 2021 & yet another crazy year

Wondering about blog secrets

Blogging Technology Secret

I have a blogging/technology secret to share with you. Today I created drafts for all thirty blog posts with the social media button string in the post, using one of my favorite computer tools: copy and paste. I love having the social media string of icons at the bottom of each blog, but you have to recreate it each time you write a blog, and that can be tedious. So I came up with a solution. (I use wordpress.com.)

Wondering how I did it:

  1. Create a new post.
  2. Select “Social Icons” from the block menu.
  3. Click plus to add one.
  4. In the search menu, type the social media site name, like Facebook.
  5. Then, in the little window, type in your URL address for your page.
  6. Click the plus and add the rest of your social media sites.
  7. Save this as a file named, “Social media icons” as a draft.
  8. Create a new post for your current blog post, name it and save it.
  9. Go back to the draft of “Social media icons.”
  10. Go up to the top of the window and to the right where you see three dots and click.
  11. Select “Copy All Content” midway down the menu. It will say on the bottom left side, “All content copied.”
  12. Go back to the current blog post and put cursor in a block, and paste! Voile!

I love sharing technology shortcuts because computers should make our lives easier, right? Wondering about anything to do with technology or blogging? Leave a comment and I’ll help if I can!

Wondering about my new book, Coronavirus Reflections: Bitter or Better?

Visit my website to find out about my new book and my other five books and three cookbooks: https://laradasbooks.com