Sunday, September 25, 2011

The Ghost's Treasure...almost there!

The past week or so has been busy.  Although a bit behind in my schedule, I've gotten Penelope and The Ghost's Treasure out on both Smashwords and Kindle. For anyone not familiar with publishing on Smashwords, the process takes a few weeks to reach other markets like Barnes and Noble, Apple, Diesel and so forth.  I am still not certain that Smashwords has its act together yet with Amazon and hence I went the direct route on the Kindle edition.

Next comes CreateSpace for the paperback edition.  I spent last three days creating the interior of the book on Word.  This poses a unique challenge to get it formatted correctly. For someone contemplating doing this on their own, I expect that a skill level of at least intermediate on Word is necessary,although advanced or even guru level is advantages. 

The real challenge with Word (I use both 2007 and 2010) is not to mess it up, especially with respect to headers and footers.  At one point all my even number pages vanished!  Another time, when I saved as PDF (which is needed for CreateSpace), I ended up with extra blank pages that didn't show up on the Word version. So much for WYSIWYG.

Next step and yet to be done is getting the cover design finished. Then marry everything together on CreateSpace and order the proof.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?

3 comments:

  1. Hi Ron. Sympathize with the CreateSpace formatting. I've gone to the point now where I'm creating the paperback version first, then *deformatting* it for Smashwords/Kindle.

    That way I get paper and e-book versions available as about the same time...

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  2. Tony, I came to the same conclusion this afternoon. Do the paperback first.

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  3. Create space requires an even amount of pages, and at least on blank page at the end and they will add them in if you don't - also I had a bizarre issue with a document once - everywhere I put section breaks it added in a blank page in the pdf - never figured out why it did that... I have a friend who owns adobe and I went in and manually deleted those...

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