Part 3
Ta-dah! I present to you my first self-pubbed e-book, Girls Succeed: Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women. I never appreciated Lea Schizas, the formatter behind Muse It Up Publishing (and co-owner), my publisher for two mysteries, Sunshine Boulevard and a new release coming in February, Coda to Murder. Believe me. I really, really do appreciate her after going through this process!
I left you in Part 2 wondering if I made it into the Smashwords Premium Distribution Catalog. This catalog is very important because a self-pubbed book will not be made available to major online booksellers if the formatting and information is not correct. I made a major mistake by including links to amazon.com in this Smashwords version of my book. That is a no-no because Barnes and Noble and Kobo are included in the booksellers distribution list. <slapping my hand to my forehead for that big error>. So that ruined my chances for acceptance, but it was a pretty easy fix once I found all the links to amazon. However in the amazon version of the book, I kept the links in. I wonder if that will gain me some brownie points with Amazon.
The biggest hassle and problem was the long nightmare of figuring out how to correct the Table of Contents formatting. Mark Coker's Smashwords Style Guide is excellent and he sets out the steps very well. I just messed up several times with the process. The huge problem is that in the Word doc, the links linking back to the T o C do work. I don't know what happens in the conversion process that corrupts the hyperlinks.
The one thing I did learn and want to pass along to you is if you check the e-pub file of your book after uploading to the meatgrinder right away, you can catch errors and not wait for any word to come down from those reviewers in cyberspace. Smashwords suggests you use the adobe digital reader to check it out. You can download this reader for FREE. I waited about four days to get an okay and I got antsy, so I re-read the Style Guide and discovered I could go ahead and upload another version since I knew something was wrong.
I'm sure there will always be things to tweak in the book and updating to be done, but I am proud to present the links to the e-book below. Download a sample so you can see the results of my labors.
Amazon Link http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NY6ZAS
Smashwords Link http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/241825
Best wishes to all of you who are striving to achieve your dream of publishing a book!
3 comments:
Wow! Three blogs. That's amazing. Good luck to you and thanks for stopping by and saying hello!
Thank you for stopping by here, Stephen!
Gads, Janet, you've scared the heck out of me. There is no way I could have pulled all that off. Bravo to you for being so persistent and smart enough to figure it out.
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