Publishing a Book on Amazon

I've written my next book and it's about to be published. I just wanted to share what is helping me publish.

Here are the Kindle Publishing Guidelines they are very detailed and a little too detailed for me.

My friend, Lis Sowerbutts, has published a book



Kindle Nonfiction Formatting Guide: Solve Your Nonfiction Formatting Problems (How To Format Your Book For Kindle) 

then I discovered that Kindle publishing has produced an easier guide than their Kindle Publishing Guidelines,

Building Your Book for Kindle

So, now I have lots to read.

John Daulton

John Daulton is a friend of mine who has written The Galactic Mage and Rift in the Races, two popular  science fiction novels. Here's an article he wrote on his blog about using Facebook paid advertising to promote his book. Warning - he's a writer, it's a long blog post.

FACEBOOK PAGES FOR AUTHORS AND BOOKS: THE FUNNEL IS YOUR FRIEND

Still Writing My Book

Watch this space! I hope to have my next book published during March. As I write this, the book is finished and is currently being proofread. The cover is being designed and I'm working on the five appendices and other little things like who to dedicate it to.

February has been a crazy month. I've ignored everything except the homescholing of my daughter and the writing of my book, which is about 30,000 words long (my longest yet). Then for the last week of February I went down with a 'flu bug. My son, who is at college about an hour away went down with a more severe case of the 'flu bug (even though we'd been nowhere near each other), and needed rescuing and driven back home for mom to look after. So, while sick, I did an emergency rescue of my son and brought him home to recover.

I'm behind on my blogs, the house is a mess, I've still not recovered from the 'flu, but I'm very excited about my imminent book release.

How To Put a YouTube Video on Your Blog

Advertising Kindle Books

In an effort to publicize my Kindle books, I made a couple of videos where I read a chapter from my books. Here are my videos:

Homeschooling Boys



Living Simply

Spell checking site I like to use

I told you yesterday I am writing another book, well I'd like to tell you about a spell checking site I've started using. I started to wonder if there was a grammar spell check that was a little better than Microsoft Word and so I asked a question on WebAnswers

As a result of that question, I have started using www.paperrater.com and am loving it. It's free and I can highly recommend it.

Welcome to the Internet, Mom!

January has seen me writing my next book. I scheduled my blogs to update once a week each, left my websites alone for month, and I've been writing another homeschooling book. As I write this I'm at chapter 30 of what I hope will be a 40-45 chapter book. Hopefully it will be published by the end of February.

I had a bit of an online argument that I'd like to discuss here. Now, I'm part of a few forums and question and answer sites. If I'm thinking of something, I throw out a question and have fun reading the answers. Sometimes I'm writing an article and I ask a question about what I'm writing and sometimes the answers influence my article.

So, I wrote 5 chapters of my book one day and 5 chapters the next and while I was writing those chapters I put 5 questions on a forum in the space of one afternoon. As I did that I started to wonder if I should say anything about the fact that this was in fact research for my book. As I was wondering, a question came in and asked me what the sudden questions were for? I replied honestly that yes, I was writing a book, and yes this was research and I was wondering if I should say something. And then the floodgates opened...

People got really upset that something they said online could be used in a book for someone to make a profit. One person accused me of lying by saying I only admitted I was doing research when questioned, and how did they know I was just about to say something? But then the forum thread calmed down and a number of people answered my original question and said they didn't mind me using the information they gave.

When I analysed the thread later, it was really only three people who were objecting, but they were being very vocal and posting a lot, so it seemed like many people were attacking me. I was a little surprised by the venom in the attacks. After all, I could have used the forum for information without posting anything and no one would have known. Everything written on the Internet is available for anyone to read and use.

So, the lesson learned is that before I ask a first question, I now make known that the information received may be used in my book. Then if people don't want to give me free information, they at least have a choice.

The other lesson learned is how quickly someone can be nasty on the Internet for something small, especially when they are writing under a pseudonym.

A different happening, but I recently told my teenage son, "Someone online has said something that has upset me." To which he smiled and replied, "Welcome to the Internet, Mom!"

What's your opinion?