My Experience with Kindle Direct Publishing

Love them or hate them, Amazon is a powerful online retailer, selling more electronic books than anyone else,. They have earned this with their powerful online presence and low margins. But they also created programs and tools for Indie authors that are easy to use, with lots of features to make uploading your book to their servers very simple; to a point. I'm going to cover my experience with using their Kindle Direct Publishing model for eBooks.

First you need to get your document formatted correctly. There are many books out there that cover this, and even templates you can purchase or a formatting service that will expensively covert your work. I've found with a couple of tweaks I can do this myself to get the document just right for KDP. I use Word, which works fine, but you need to setup the Styles for the document with certain settings, depending on what part of the book you are working on.

• Single spacing should be used
• Don't use tabbing to indent paragraphs or it will indent too far
• Enable Show/Hide Command (Ctrl + *) to see extra spaces, tabbing and other hidden formatting symbols and remove them
• Keep font size to Times New Roman 12 or something similar
• Create and save your own Style pages for Chapter Heading, Main body of text. Title Page and Copy-write page and so on. Format them to what works best.

Body of Text Example:
Right click a current Style page from Home Tab and select modify
Give it a name and then change the font and pt size to what you want
Click Format and Paragraph-Set Paragraph settings for Indents and Spacing:

• General-Alignment left
• Indentation-Special First Line 0.3
• Spacing-Line Spacing Single

Set Paragraph settings for Lines and Page Breaks:

• Remove checkmark on Window/Orphan Control
• Remove checkmark on Keep lines together

You'll then want to create a Chapter Heading Style, just be sure to choose a large font size, center it with no indentation. Then select the Style page you want to use before typing and it will be automatically formatted. Play with it to find the right one for you.

Once you have your document written, save the file as a Web Page Filtered (HTM/HTML) format. Then you can use the Kindle Previewer program Amazon provides to open the HTML file and see how it will look on the variety of Kindle devices Amazon sells. Be sure you still keep the original DOC or DOCX version for editing.

Depending on the version of Word you have, the steps may vary some. I'm using Word 2007, 2010 and 2013, and they are basically all the same. Pre-Ribbon versions of Word maybe different. It may take some time but once you find the right configuration you can carry it over to your next novel. At least until Amazon throws you a curve and changes their conversion techniques.

The novel is written and formatted, so it's now ready to upload to the KDP site. Next posting I'll run through the steps, as there are many of them, so you can publish your eBook.

   

Facebook Author Event

I will be participating in this Facebook Author event both Saturday 9-27 (9AM Denver Time) and Sunday 9-28 (12PM Denver Time). This is an event where readers and authors can meet up to talk, check out new books, genres and authors, have the opportunity to win prizes from the donation authors and play lots of silly games in the process. You can ask questions and learn all my deep dark secrets. If you have some time stop in and say hello.

https://www.facebook.com/events/537754582991806/

Becoming Jarvis Mann PI

Of the 5 people who've read my Jarvis Mann PI stories, OK maybe it's little more than 5, they ask me if the character Jarvis Mann is actually me in written form. Well my answer is a definite, Maybe!

The cliche is "You write what you know." In the case of Jarvis that is true. Since my stories about him are in the first person I become Jarvis while writing. I see, hear, feel, speak and react as him. Describing through his eyes all that he is experiencing, his inner most thoughts and emotions.So there are things about him that are similar. Examples are:

• Jarvis grew up in Iowa, as did I
• Jarvis now lives in Colorado as do I
• Jarvis likes the finest in fast foods (oxymoron), as do I
• Jarvis is a big Green Bay Packers fan to be revealed in next book. My bio picture tells you I am as well
• Jarvis has a witty personality. Many comment I have a odd sense of humor, though some in my immediate family don't think so some times!

But there are many difference as well:

• Jarvis is a Private Investigator. I'm an IT professional full time, Though at one time I wanted to be a police officer
• Jarvis drives 1969 Mustang Boss 302. I drive a slightly less exciting Toyota Corolla and a Honda Forza Motorcycle
• Jarvis is much more of a ladies man. I was much too quiet and shy in my single days to ever be a ladies man
• Jarvis is in his mid-thirties, while it's been a couple of decades since I was that age

I pull some of my life experiences into my stories, as I'm sure all writers do. I try to use real life locations when it's appropriate. The people in the story are made up, designed to fit the story. Some aspects of my characters may be similar to people I've known through the years, but nobody is a carbon copy. In some ways Jarvis is me, but mostly he isn't. The common denominator between us is, we are flawed, with weaknesses and some bad character traits. While he also has some strengths I wish I had, as I live vicariously through him. I will be exploring more of these strength's and weaknesses in future novels already in the works

Jarvis Mann is not me, and I'm not him. Yet we are one in the same on the printed page.

The Title of the Story Is...

Coming up with a title is generally for me not all that hard. Not that I've written hundreds of stories through the years, but I always seem to have the title come pretty quickly to me. With my latest novel "Tracking A Shadow" I struggled a little with the title. Next to the cover, the book title is the first thing a potential buyer will see. And I had several ideas for titles come and go for this novel. When the framework was developing in my mind "The Stalker" was the basic title. But it really didn't fit quite or feel right. I then went through many others:

Mind over what matters

Body and No Soul

Track the Shadow

Shadows

Behind the Shadow

Beyond the Shadow

Underneath the Shadow

Separate Lives

The Game of Distraction

These are the ones I wrote down, but there were many others that rolled through my head. Finding the right theme or the tone was difficult, maybe because of the twists in the plot. I didn't want to give too much away but give an overall feel to what was happening on the pages. The Shadow was really Jarvis being somewhat clueless on what was really going on, while attempting to track down the evidence, bringing it out of the darkness.

I also wanted a title that stood out and wasn't used before. A simple Google search didn't find another story with the same title. I wanted it to be unique to stand out and be first when someone searched it. (No that's not the case as of yet, but close to the top). Hopefully I succeeded in creating an interesting mood of mystery with the title and the cover, which translates when the reader reads the story.

Do others out there struggle with their book titles as well? Is the title as important as the cover when drawing potential readers?

Tracking a Shadow-Now Available on Amazon Kindle

Tracking a Shadow, my new novel with Jarvis Mann PI working a stalking case of a Beautiful Woman with many twists and turns. It is available today as an Amazon eBook for $2.99. Stop by and pick it up today at the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MQHVKJA

Never knowing where his next case will come from, Private Detective Jarvis Mann is thrilled when his voicemail is lit up by the sexy tones of a lady looking to hire him. Successful business woman Emily White with girl next door looks, is certain someone is stalking her and wants Jarvis to track down the elusive shadow. Even with three suspects, an ex-husband who lives to play softball, a sexist pig ex-employee and a mystery man who he encounters with painful results, Jarvis believes it’s all in Emily’s head until a killing in her home convinces him otherwise. Further complicating matters a powerful business man and crime boss becomes involved muddying up the case, leaving Jarvis the prime suspect in the brutal beating of one of the possible stalkers, threatening to put his PI career on ice. Navigating through each twist and turn in the case, and the affections of two desirable women both with an agenda, Jarvis uses dogged determination and razor sharp wit in Tracking a Shadow that moves across the Denver landscape with each shift in the sun.

Also available for free for the next several days in my short story "The Case of the Missing Bubble Gum Card", where Jarvis helps a young man track down a missing stolen and valuable Ernie Banks rookie Baseball card. See where Jarvis Mann PI is brought to life. It's available as an Amazon ebook and on Smarshwords in various other formats (Nook,Kobo, iBook and PDF) for free over the next few week.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/456110

Thanks for reading and I hope everyone is having a great day...

A Break: My Trip to Lambeau Field

I took 10 days off with family to take a trip to Green Bay for the Packers Shareholder Meeting. Being a shareholder allows me the privilege of sitting with about twenty thousand of my closet friends in Lambeau Field to learn how successful the previous year was and what the coming year holds for the team. I enjoyed this immensely as I got to see a legendary stadium that was in perfect shape, looking as if it was just built yesterday. It was a trip of a lifetime the wife, daughter and I will never forget.

But more importantly it gave me a chance to get away from work, writing, and stop interacting on the various social networks. It was 10 days completely away from all of it, which was fabulous. Reinvigorated I'm now ready to get back to the work in front of me. It really is important to step away for periods of time from all of these tasks and come back with a clearer head. I've had two large breaks over the last couple of months that I really needed. And I'd suggest strongly to everyone to do the same when feeling run down, short on energy and ideas. Take a break from it all; no 9-5 working, no posting on social networks and no writing. Disconnect from the information highway as much as you can, even if it's just a simple overnight trip to a hotel out of town with a loved one, a day or two in the mountains where cell signals don't exist or just a nice long ride on a bicycle or motorcycle to have a picnic somewhere. You will find a new perspective that will charge up the creative mind to new limits.

So back to the tap, tap on the QWERTY keys picking up where Jarvis Mann left off...

The Real and the Imagined

With all works of fiction the people are not real and any resemblance to real people living or dead is purely coincidental. But what about places and businesses. Some of the locations in my soon to be released new novel Tracking a Shadow are real, like Boone's which is a sports bar near Denver University. I've been there before, eaten their food and drank their drinks. I even went there years ago when it was called Fagan's. A friend owned it at that time and we often stopped by after our softball games for chicken wings and refreshments. Is there a standard rule of thumb of when to use real places and when to use fictional ones?

In my stories I try to use real locations as much as possible from the Denver metro area. Streets, neighborhoods, houses and businesses. It's where I live and adds a genuine flair to the narrative. I use made up locations when it houses the bad guys, or when Jarvis has negative connotations to blab on about, or if horrible events happen like murder. I keep it as real as possible, but then the imagined fills out the story. In the next novel I'm working on there is "The Hustle" in Greeley Colorado, a gentleman's club, and "Eddie's Bar" that is a run down watering hole in South Denver. Neither are real, as both are run by criminal elements needed for the plot. Using real businesses in those settings wouldn't work. An established business would take offense if I stated a shady loan shark owned it and used it for his illegal doings.

So for the writers out there when do you use the Real and when do you use the Imagined?