New Cover and Formatting Issues

The new cover for Shadowland - thanks Jussy, much more dark n moody:)

Formatting Issues.

Like many authors I am on a big learning curve when it comes to formatting and promoting my ebooks.

Uploading to the kindle program on Amazon was painless enough, that was until I wanted to update some of the text and change the cover. All of a sudden, I had to become some sort of computer programmer, or so it seemed it to me.  I managed to work my way through so I thought I would share a few of the links and programmes that have helped me so far on this blog.

If you are looking to offer giveaways or send copies of your ebook anywhere, you have to be able to offer several different versions to potential readers and reviewers. I offer pdf, mobi for kindle and epub for most other e readers.

To make a pdf from my book, which was written in 'Word,' I can highly recommend a free programme called PDF redirect. Even for a complete computer fool like me it was easy to do.

Most people are going to ask for a mobi file and the easiest I have so far found is MobiPocket creator, another free programme that does exactly as it says on the box. I tried several other programmes that did help me create a mobi file, but they all had various issues with formatting, more about formatting in a moment. To finish on programmes, the last I recommend authors checking out is Calibre. Calibre will change the format into epub or kindle, but do watch out for formatting problems if you haven't done a perfect formatting job.

Which leads me into formatting - so important, so boring and yet so necessary. KDP at amazon and Smashwords have great articles and there is a great article here showing what needs to be done. Just discovering there was a formatting show/hide button in word was a revelation to me! How was I to know that there is all kind of code going on in the background that means stuff and gives strange commands when you come to make up your ebook. Page breaks for instance, wow, you need to instruct where to break the page? Yep!

Oh, and how to put in your table of contents! You can find that stuff here, and you really do need to do it yourself.

So, once we've done all that were finished? ... well did you think about a cover? I have been very fortunate to find a fellow member of the goodreads community, Jussy who has helped me turn my lame cover into something far more likely to sell a few books – thanks Jussy!

So now I have done all that, Shadowland is up and ready to send out and sell again ... editing is nearly finished on Flight of the Griffin .... but I need to make up a cover ..ahhhhh, here we go again!