Plein air Painting: the book cover
Photograph and Photoshop
©2013 Charlene Brown
This is the cover of the book I've been writing over the
past few months. It’s finally up for sale on Amazon
and it’s in a format that allows you to read a few pages for free.
I say ‘finally’ because when I started the
process I was under the impression that publishing books in Kindle-readable
format was a straightforward process – especially if you’d already written a
bunch of blog posts that looked like they might flow together in an orderly
manner.
I should mention before continuing that Kindle Direct
Publishing really is amazingly straightforward… unless, of course, you want to
put a few pictures in your book! My Kindle conversion misadventures went on for
some time, until I discovered ebookpartnership.com who said they could convert
my manuscript to look pretty much like the pdf I’d sent them. But the whole thing was still pretty scary…
Then, on February 9 I saw an article by Seth Godin, The Roller Coaster of Shipping,
that I found very reassuring. The article contains an annotated graph of the terrifying stages of publishing a book. I was going through Stage 6 – “the pre-publication lizard-brain second-guess”
at the time, and it was quite a revelation to learn that even Seth Godin, who
has written a lot of best-selling books, would ever go through Stage 6. AND what was even better was discovering that it
would be followed by the infinitely better Stage 7 – where you realize it’s
really going to happen. That is the stage I'm now enjoying!
BTW, Stage 8 is annotated, "Why haven't you read my
book yet?" Wait for it.
