Never Say Self-Publication is Easy

I feel like this pig. Clearly has no business swimming in the ocean, but there it is, with a passenger to boot.

FIRST OF ALL, if you do say self-publishing is easy, I will kick your ass.  This self-publishing business is NOT. REMOTELY. EASY.  Just getting the book on a forum after watching videos and reading articles, not to mention the actual writing, copy-editing, and revising, all of that is hard.  Did I mention how intricate it is to design covers?  And my covers don't look nearly as good I would like. 

Did I make mistakes this first round?  Hell yes!  I may repost the Microsoft Word file that feeds into the Kindle Reader.  The *.epub version looks great, thanks to Eric Allen Yankee, who made it look pretty.  Eric's the best, and he should help other noob writers for a decent fee.  I do plan on paying him to design the others.  He is very busy, and I am infinitely grateful for his support.  Certainly, his was a great start.  I totally owe him.  Plus, I learned a ton from the file he reformatted for me.

There were some minor issues with the file he rebuilt.  Wouldn't you know CSS actually came in handy?  Do you remember CSS?  Well, many many years ago, I taught myself HTML and CSS, like when both coding systems came out, because I thought I was going to be a web designer.  Today, CSS came in handy to fix one of the links and raised letters at the beginning of the first story.

Anyway, consider this the test run, just that a test.  And if my Kindle book looks like shit, the next one will look way better.  The Long Walk is still awaiting approval and will be up 5 to 7 days from now, if all goes well, but you can find it soon at:  www.smashwords.com/books/view/840442.

I do want to post it on Amazon, now that I have an ISBN number, but I want the Kindle version to look pretty, before I do that. 

What's coming next, "La Bruja".  No, not La Bruja del Barrio Loco, but a short story only a few people have seen.  It was very much inspired by Stephen King's "Grandma" and folktales of naughty Mexican children being kidnapped.

Here is a draft of the cover of that next piece.  I think it's pretty cool, but the text may be hard to read.

If you had some challenges today, brush them off and keep writing. #Resist

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