I finally found the time to format both my books for the Kindle. It’s a project that has been idling on my to-do list for two years. When I would think about it, I would be up to my eyebrows in work, and when I had the time, I wouldn’t remember to do it. However, both have been submitted for approval by the Amazon team, so I should know by tomorrow if they’re approved. I’m not 100% satisfied with how they looked on the preview screen because the Kindle strips away most formatting, but hopefully they’ll be legible enough for the average Kindle reader.
It’s fairly obvious that e-books are the future, so I’m going to try to get mine out there in as many formats as possible. Next, I’ll submit them to Lightning Source, my current printer, for them to distribute in their network. I’m hoping that these new outlets will help to get the series wider exposure. With book three nearing release, it would be nice to broaden the audience. My fellow independents can attest, often in this industry, we work and work and work without seeing much in return because making a dent in people’s consciousness has become extraordinarily difficult recently. People are so overwhelmed by commercials and marketing that a lone voice from the independent realm is often lost in the din.
Yet we still press on, hoping to build an audience and hoping that one day all of this effort and energy will be worth it. Even though we all proclaim that we don’t write for the money, most of us want at least to make our living solely from our writing, and while that doesn’t sound like an unreasonable wish for a novelist, in this country at this time, it often feels like an absurd pipe-dream. Maybe it was always this tough, and I just had unrealistic expectations. Country musicians used to call it “The long, hard road” to success, and maybe writing has always been this difficult to break into. All I know is that I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback on my books, but to the large presses, I’m not up to par. Either my readers are fluffing my ego or the editors are out of touch. Either way, I’ll press on, writing a series that lives up to my standards and promoting as much as I can.
Big Owl's Tree 