Print Addition

I am here to announce the release of The Gates of Nottingham in print! As it turns out, Adobe Acrobat is no longer needed to make this happen on Amazon’s affiliate, Createspace. They have just released templates that work very well. Granted, you can’t get super fancy, but that was not what I wanted in the first place. The template was easy to use even with a behemoth like my novel which ended up being 475 pages in this format. Here I am reading it:

Shameless self promotion (like the picture above) is what’s up next. I have a couple of little fairs and book-signings scheduled, but I’m a little bit at loose ends right now. I am new to my community and net-working was never my forte. Anyone have any suggestions? I was thinking it might help to donate a copy to a few local libraries and that since I am now officially self-published, I could teach a few courses on how to do it. Obviously, the internet is where it’s at right now as far as sales go, but if I can at least get local buzz, that can help with the online part.

Right?

I've read books on the subject, but those don’t really give many concrete answers. So, I must turn to you for fresh ideas ideas. Everybody chime in.

Published

It’s been a little hectic in my writer’s brain lately. I had a massive crisis of confidence which put me on hold for a while. Then there was Christmas and I got two different colds. So, nothing much has been happening. However, as a result of my massive freak-out, I did re-write the ending of The Gates of Nottingham. This cut 20 pages from the book, which is good because it was too long anyway.

Long story short, last night I uploaded to Smashwords. I made up my mind that I’m at a fish or cut bait place right now. Either I should quit talking about publishing and decide that I’m a horrible writer or I should just do it and see what happens. I need to trust my own opinions, and my opinion is that this is a good book. Is it absolutely the best book ever? No. I worked very hard on it though, and it is better than probably 80% of the professionally published slush I read on a daily basis. Of course everyone will have different tastes. Some people will love it and some people will hate it. Some people will be in between. I need to get it out there for my own sake, though.

I would do things differently now, but I think that, in a way, our writing is a time capsule. I was in a different place in my life when I wrote The Gates of Nottingham. My feelings were different and so was my writing style. I am a hyper-critical person and if I don’t just say enough is enough, this will never happen for me.

So it’s out there now. It is available on Smashwords here and has already had 10 samples downloaded since last night which is exciting. It is still sitting in the vetting process, so it isn’t available through any of Smashword’s distributers yet, but in a month’s time it ought to be available from Sony, Apple, Barnes and Noble, etc. I just finished uploading to Kindle and that should take 2-3 days before I get the green light. Then it will be available on Amazon.

At the moment, I am struggling to figure out what to do for a PDF for the CreateSpace version. I really don’t want to buy Adobe, but I’m not finding a way out of it.