Musings of Two Creative Minds

The last 7 days have kept me busy.  I mean REALLY busy.  And the sad thing about it all is that some of this could have been avoided....up to a point.  Now I'm talking about re-editing my first novel AFTER it had already come out.  Why would I do that?  Because in spite of the combined efforts of myself and 2-3 other people checking the novel over for grammatical errors, a number of them got past all of us.  From day one, I was determined to try and put out as good a product as I possibly could.  And when I found out I'd failed, I felt obligated to go back and fix things. Now, I'm sure a number of you are wondering to yourselves, "Is he saying he never got it professionally edited?"  The answer is, "I did not."  Now, this is not because I was so arrogant in my own writing abilities, nor was it because I was being cheap and didn't want to put the money out.  The truth is... my wife and I have applied for Food Stamps and have been gettin...

Okay, as you all know my first book is out.  "The Bridge" is available on Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, I-Tunes, Nook, Kobo, Smashwords, Createspace, and a bunch of other places.  How did I do it?  And how are the sales coming so far?  Are probably what you are asking at this point.    Well, I'll be honest, the sales are going slowly.  The book has only been out maybe 2 weeks and during that time it took over a week for it to appear on a number of those sites.  But that's no excuse.  It is definitely out there, so why aren't more people buying it right away?  The answer is simple, "They don't know it's out there!" Now here's where we get into today's discussion.  I'll briefly answer the first question "How did I get it in so many places?"  Then we'll address how I'm going about to correct the problem of getting the word out. Now I published my novel both in e-book form and trade paperback for those who ...

Okay, so I've had my debut on Smashwords and learned a lot from just going through the process.  Today I'd like to share a bit of my experience of working in Smashwords with you all.  First up, it wasn't all that hard and I say this as someone who is NOT "Tech-Savvy".  Luckily I do know MS Word. Now I want to say, simply follow their directions.  Make a back up copy of your work and then totally do the conversion on the back-up copy NOT the original.  This is because all that lovely formatting you did originally to your piece is about to got out the window and be undone.  Why?  Because Smashwords is helping you re-format your work so it can operate in the e-book program world and will look nice and readable.  Remember, if you're going this route you want to present a beautiful product for your audience.  Plus, your work deserves to be presented in the best fashion possible.  You're not doing this just for your readers, it's also for yo...