MY CAKE IS BAKED!

It’s live! I’m live and kicking and here’s the proof: US link http://www.amazon.com/Time-ebook/dp/B00DX3389G/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1373757346&sr=1-2&keywords=time

And here’s the UK link: : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-ebook/dp/B00DX3389G/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1373756642&sr=1-2&keywords=time

All in all it took about 24 hrs to be reviewed and published – hope I don’t go all click happy and keep checking to see if anyone has bought, is buying it. But, I didn’t do this for the money – ‘cause there aint none in poetry! It’s all about the adventure and experience for me…isn’t real life fab? And, online life is just cookin fine.

WAITING NOW

I had decided to go with Amazon but I couldn’t get very far because I didn’t have the right banking details for the transferring of money across the world so I slipped over to Smashwords, who will pay via PayPal, and completed the publishing process there. I had a couple of mistakes which were very quickly resolved so as it sat in the waiting for review queue I downloaded it to see what it looked like – and was not happy. All the paragraphs had an indented line! And, I knew that there wasn’t one in my formatting. So I popped back into the Style Guide and found a quick check, went back and did it to my document and republished it, but it still had the misshapen lines. So I unpublished it.

I had the brainwave to slip into online banking and see if I could find those bank numbers but couldn’t so I did something I haven’t had to do for years – I called the bank at 1am and they gave me the details I needed. So now I’m in the Amazon waiting for review queue but the book looks the way I planned it! I’ll do Smashwords later; maybe with all the republishing new documents the new one didn’t really get through. We’ll see.

THE DEED IS DONE

When I read that sometimes centring doesn’t stick and that you can fiddle with the settings to add something to Normal I freaked. It is terrifying to think that settings could be mashed beyond recognition and your life would become a nightmare. So I saved the document under yet another name and set out on this adventure…three minutes later I was punching air and whispering, Get in. Done it. I am very happy with this self, that she can read instructions and go away to let them stew in her brain for a few days so that on return and with a little courage she can do the deed.

I only centred the title page and the Table of Contents; I didn’t want to fiddle with page widths to make the copyright page centred – that would be a bridge just too far. So, with that success behind me I went straight on to the task of hyperlinking the Table of Contents – eek! But it was easy. I’d read the instructions last week and last night again and all that was left to do was go for it. Yes, I made a couple of mistakes and had to go back and do them again; that was because there were quite a few poem titles beginning with the same word, and the instructions said you only needed the first word to be listed…but they also explain a scenario where you captalise the first letter of every word but leave out the spaces – TheRightThingToDo as an example.

All the formatting is done. So today, I will be sweeping over each poem in case any of them need a little tweak with the last hug. I think I’m just going to put the book up at Amazon first – I can do Smashwords later if I want…small steps. I’ll be back, perhaps waving a big link.

LINK

One of my poems is featured here http://postcardpoemsandprose.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/island-by-mahri-fleet/

I really like the idea of this site and hope they take more from me in the future.

Almost There

Finally, the collection is an inch away from publishing. I took it through the nuclear wipe again yesterday, cut n pasted it through Notepad and back again, and all the formatting I'd done with the hard returns was wiped and I had to do them again! Still, it didn't take long, and it's always a good thing to keep sweeping over to catch any missing punctuation or typos (not that there should be any of them left) but I did catch several words that had reverted to the American spelling – ize words.

I worked out how to do the paragraph with 'after' spaces which suits poetry stanzas perfectly (advice discovered in Smashwords free Style guide). Ahhh. It really is amazing what you can learn with time in between readings and a few practises thrown into the mix…makes me want to publish more books!

Working on the biog bits now and descriptions of the book with quick overview of the poems. I don't know what kind of stuff will be needed in the publishing process but I want to be ready so it can go quickly. If my manuscript is good enough for Smashwords Premium Catalog, it will be passed on to Kobo and Kindle and other booksellers, so I'm going to try that first; it seems easier.

I just have to spend a little time making sure the poems are the best they can be and that the order I've chosen is the right one and then it'll be off, into the big wild world.

A Good Day Off

I chose these poems because they were about time, the times, and how some people deal with time and how time affects them. As I was working through all the work I’d piled into this it was only when I listed every poem with a statement on its content that I could see what didn’t fit; that last rout went from 50 poems down to 30 then I had to work to find the last ten – which were among the stack without titles and still in second draft. So I now have my 40 poems, mostly edited and formatted. Today is my day off but I really do need to clean up my desk because tomorrow a man will want to get at the radiatior behind it so I can’t be poeting all day.

Well it’s 9.30pm and I haven’t cleared the desk or the stuff that’s fallen off it or down the back of it or got the craft cupboard door closed yet, but there’s still time. I’ve been watching some TV drama, three in a row but something was running through my head about my character thinking 100 yrs into the future and calculating scenarios of how her family would grow and what life would be like for them, so, I might just take a little wander over there for a while.

I also made a few more book covers using different text and the other butterfly pics so now I have a lot to choose from but I think I know which one I’ll go for, and it’s not the one below – similar but better.

BOOK COVER

Can’t sleep so the best thing to do is fart about with photos in Picassa’s editing suite, and here I’ve discovered the book cover – after about a dozen attempts with different titles over the last few weeks. This is it…and I painted the butterflies; actually they were just marks made with a fancy new brush many years ago.