Friday, August 26, 2016

The Big Day!

The proof came last Friday. It made for an exciting day of celebration and I was only able to post a photo to my blog.

This Friday Clouds Over Bishop Hill went LIVE on Amazon.


It's a big day nearly six years in the making. I'm wearing my 2010 NaNoWriMo winner T-shirt in the photo. I've saved it all these years for exactly this day.







Friday, August 12, 2016

ISBN

Clouds Over Bishop Hill now has become a real entity with its own ID number: 978-0-9906190-3-1.

It was real before. Now, it is a little more so.

We are going through the process of uploading files to CreateSpace. I wish I could say all went well and there were no glitches, but there were a few.

There had to be few “somethings.” For us it was: having pages and pages of forms to fill out, proving citizenship, having a nice Midwestern thunderstorm roll through, and losing the modem connection in the middle of uploading.

But so far there have been no total disasters. The forms were filled out and accepted. I can now personally vouch that having a cell phone that can do tethered Wi-Fi is a wonderful sanity-saving thing.

The greatest delay came from the cover spine. It had to be made larger because of a different paper choice. Cream paper is fatter than white paper? Who knew.

Which is the point. We are all learning new things here.

But annoying or not, every step gets me closer to having a real book in hand.

And closer to the time to think more seriously about marketing plans. 

There will be a book!

Friday, August 5, 2016

The New Website

My latest website took a little over four days to make. Two days to play around with the modular components and understand how they work. A half day to make a plan for the overall design of the elements I deemed important for my site. The rest to actually write some copy, capture my cover photo, and fit everything together into two columns.

I used Weebly Website Builder, a site my husband had directed me to. He hadn’t used it himself, but had heard it would be easy to use. His goal was for me to do it myself.

I was able to get it done. Pretty much on my own.

I got my columns set up. I would have preferred one column larger than the other, but couldn’t make it happen. That was probably for the best because two equal columns look really good on small screens like cell phones.

I was able to activate the links to my blog and my Facebook author page. (I had husband standing by to make sure I entered the right info.)

I needed the most assistance to get the cover photo. (I watched him do it and I sort of understood.)

Of all the websites I’ve designed, this one went the easiest and the fastest. I’m confident that my first updates will go just as smoothly.

I will find out fairly soon because I finished the last editorial review of the manuscript last night. It’s really going to happen. Clouds Over Bishop Hill will be out in the world soon and I will be out there trying to introduce it and myself to prospective readers. The new website will be an invaluable tool.