May is almost gone!

The Kindle Edition of Emily & the Silent King is now available on Amazon. It was painful to convert the file to straight HTML for that format and lose all the page formatting and wonderful fonts I had agonized over for hours, but in its current form, the Kindle only supports a very restricted set of file types. There is a new larger format kindle that supports PDF files and I am hoping that becomes the standard.

The revised version of Devin & The Empire of Wolves has been shipped off to my editor. I should be receiving it back in a couple of weeks, which means I had better get busy on the cover for the book! I have two ideas for the cover but one may be overly ambitious with the time frame I have. I thought about hiring an artist, but after reading the lengthy copyright issues raised by doing this, I've decided to continue generating my own images.

The paperback version of Emily & The Silent King is still slowly making its way through the book scene. I am planning to do some signings and book readings locally. It has been very difficult trying to get word out and I'm trying to do everything I can. I'm very new to this self promotion process so if anyone has any advice or suggestions I would greatly appreciate them!

At last!!

The paperback edition of Emily & The Silent King is finally available on Amazon! It has been available from my CreateSpace e-store for  a  couple of days, but I was waiting for it to show up on Amazon before I posted anything! The process was supposed to take up to 15 days, but when I came home from work today I was pleasantly surprised when it popped up ready to order! 

The book can be purchased direct from Amazon or from my e-store on CreateSpace. Unfortunately I cannot offer a discount through Amazon but I can offer one through my own e-store. If you haven't joined my Legends of Midralon fan page on facebook, stop by now to get the discount code! Also, don't forget to join the Legends of Midralon Twitter account! 

A Great Big Thanks to everyone for all the support you've given me!

So the final proof wasn't so final...

I have given up calling the book proofs that I order "the final one" or "the last one". Every time I say that, the proof arrives and I find an error or something that needs tweaking. Having said all that, I STILL think the latest version of the book will indeed be "the one". It shipped out on Friday so I am expected it to be in my hands by Monday or Tuesday of this upcoming week. After every rejected proof, I have compiled a list of things to check for and this one appears to have met all of the requirements! We'll soon find out!

As part of the pending media campaign for the release of Emily & The Silent King, I have created a Twitter entry for the book at: http://twitter.com/Midralon. I am still learning the ropes of self promotion, but almost every "expert" in the self publishing field stresses getting word about your book out in as many places as  possible. I would appreciate any and all recommendations anyone cares to make regarding possible promotion sites!

Inch by inch!

What I am sincerely hoping is the final proof of book one has been shipped to me and should arrive by early next week! I think I've finally managed to tweak the cover and arrange the interior text in a good format! So when the proof arrives I will quickly scan it and make the book available publicly!

I created a Legends of Midralon Facebook page, so if you are on facebook, I would be very honored if you would stop by and become a fan! Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your local librarians! Tell anyone who enjoys a good fantasy story!

I'm going to take my wife out for a little celebration dinner when that happens, she has been so  supportive to me in what has become basically just an expensive hobby(who would have thought self publishing could be so expensive!) I wish my editor Jill lived closer too so I could invite her and her husband as well. 

Even though I technically published my book last year, that was an unedited version and it lacked some of the small changes that I think make it a better story now than it was then. So I am treating this as the first "official" launch of the book. I learned a lot from several of the costly mistakes I made using the print-on-demand services. My biggest mistake not being more patient with the process. That mistake, more than any other, I hope to correct when I release the other books in the series.

I've started the second rewrite on Devin & The Empire of Wolves. I need to get a hold of Jill and figure out an editing schedule for it, but first I want to make sure Emily & The Silent King is smoothly released to the public. I'm going to be making the rounds of the inter-tron trying to drum up some interest in the book on various book/reading group sites! Wish me luck!

On Writing

I just finished reading Stephen King's On Writing and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It is the first piece of non-fiction that I've read in quite some time. He doled out some excellent advice, some of which I had already been doing (which pleased me greatly) and the autobiographical material was interesting. I never considered myself a huge Stephen King fan, but then, when I sat down and thought about it, I realized that I had  read quite a few of his books in my teen years. I think the first of his books I read was The Shining, then a collection of short stories titled Night Shift. Then I read The Stand. I don't remember if I read any more of his works after that, but I've seen tons of movies and made-for-TV movies based on his work, enjoying most (but not all) of them. So I guess I am a bigger fan than I realized!

As for my book, I am still making tweaks to it. I'm on the third proof version and still found a few things I want to change before I pronounce it ready for the public. Adobe InDesign helped me tame the layout problems and now I'm just tweaking a few sentences my daughter Emily wanted changed. The cover is still giving me a few problems, but I have a handle on what I want to do and it is all coming together. Soon...very soon!

Update on the proof

I received the proof copy for my book on Monday! There were a few problems that I'll have to correct so it's not quite ready for the public yet. The cover turned out very nice and with the exception of the main image being slightly too dark, I am very happy with the look of it! I would put it up against any other book on the bookstore shelf! The interior is another story. For some reason the formatting was very strange with page numbers popping up in strange areas and chapter headings looking off. I've decided to bust out Adobe InDesign (thanks to a recommendation by my editor Jill!) to redo the formatting. I had been using Microsoft Word 2007 and a freeware pdf conversion utility, but I think it will be much easier for me to do this with InDesign (allowing for some time to become familiar with the application!).

In other unrelated news I am going to be launching a second blog soon that will focus on my gaming adventures with my children. We are going to be playing several boardgames and RPG's over the next few months and I wanted to blog about it. The blog is called: Ludious Resurrectio - The Resurrected Gamer  the name reflects my attempts to get back into the sort of gaming I did in my younger years! Mostly RPG's but several boardgames as well! 

So close I can smell it....

The new paperback version of the revised Emily & The Silent King is almost ready. Thanks to a ton of help from a good friend (Jill MacCorkle) I think this is the best version of the book to date. She gave me some excellent (and candid) advice that I put to use in polishing up the book. I really think this version will give me that "it's finally done" feeling and I can put it to rest and concentrate on going back over books two and three (not to mention book four).

I am just waiting on the proof to be delivered to me and then if everything looks good (fingers crossed!) I will be offering it on Amazon and an e-store very soon! I just hope the work I put into the cover picture comes through when it's printed.

I've been working on other things to support the books in my free time (what's that?). Trying to come up with a logo and other images to jazz up the pages. Hopefully I'll get enough free time this weekend to put a dent in that!