Publication Day!! (or rather, week)

Just a short post today to mark the rather momentous moment (for me, anyway) of finally seeing my book up for sale on Amazon and Kindle worldwide. 

Regular readers of this blog will know that I had planned on releasing the title in September, when people were back from their holidays and the weather was closing in. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make to just get it out there. By publishing now I get to have a 'soft opening', if you like. I can still have the big marketing push (such as it will be) in autumn but in the meantime I can gather a few reviews, speak to libraries, deal with any issues which crop up in relation to Amazon. After all, isn't one of the perks of self-publishing that your book is there for as long as you want it to be? As a self-published author, you are not competing for shelf-space in a book store, your title isn't going to be cast aside if it doesn't fly off the shelves in the first few weeks. This way I get a little extra time to get used to how everything works. 

I was glad I had chosen to go ahead early within a few hours of publishing the paperback. As part of my thorough preparation I had read that the next step, the incredibly important step that takes me from paperback to e-book, was actually quite easy thanks to a new Amazon/CreateSpace programme which does everything for you. All I had to do was hit the big blue button which said 'I want to publish this title on Kindle'. Hmmm, right. Big blue button hit, heart in mouth, totally wonky document comes out the other side. Cue several days of head scratching and searching through Amazon discussion forums which were waaaaaay over my head in terms of technical speak. In the end I stripped anything vaguely fancy out of the document (bye bye pretty gothic swirl and drop caps) and found a few tips on writing blogs which I will share with you in another post. In the end I came up with a result that works (by the way, did you know that even if you nail the formatting for Kindle, chances are it will show up differently on Apple devices?). In the end I am hoping that it is the stories that count but I am finally satisfied that I have produced something which looks as professional as I could have managed with the skills and facilities that I have.

Now I just need to find some readers.
Spooky, gothic, mysterious tales, anyone?

UK paperback HERE                 US paperback HERE
UK e-book HERE                       US e-book HERE
Easily found on all Amazon and Kindle websites globally by searching under 'BM Keeling'.

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