One year after starting on this journey, I am at a crossroads without a map
Today is the first anniversary of my departure from Sarasota, Florida, for the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I was full of excitement; I was on my way, at last! According to plan, my husband and I spent several days in Barcelona, Spain, visiting the city and adjusting to the jet lag. Barcelona is a…
Three Ways that writing my first book has changed me.
Writing a nontechnical book was never one of my life’s goals. Whenever people found out that I was a technical writer, they would inevitably ask when I was going to publish my first book. Apparently, in their minds, technical manuals are not “real” books. Though my life is chock-full of unusual experiences, I did not…
Successful launching of Women of the Way: Embracing the Camino
I am thrilled by this first month’s sales. I sold 15 books personally (mostly friends and relatives), 25 on CreateSpace, 28 on Kindle and one autographed book from my website. Amazingly, a third of the online sales were from Europe. For a newly published author, sixty-nine books in the first month is, in my opinion, …
Five things to do when revising a Kindle e-book
Once I had finished my Smashwords e-book, I realized that I needed to make changes to the Kindle version in order to make the reading of Women of the Way: Embracing the Camino as enjoyable on Kindle as on Smashwords. The easiest way to do this, I thought, was to start with the .mobi file…
Gettting Women of the Way onto Smashwords was not only easy but the process led to a better reader experience.
After my struggle to get the book into the Kindle format, I was dreading preparing the manuscript for Smashwords. That dread was needless. I used Mark Coker’s The Smashwords Style Guide rev 6.16.12. Because I had created my book using styles, I did not purge my manuscript of hidden Word corruption by using “the nuclear…
Getting Women of the Way onto Kindle was difficult, involving many iterations, and not at all satisfactory
I first published Women of the Way: Embracing the Camino on June 25th on createspace.com. It took just a few hours to prepare the book for Kindle format using the Building Your Book for Kindle guidelines. Since I wrote the book using styles, this part of the preparation was easy. I wanted a functioning Table…
Women need “sisters” to travel life’s journey
Biological: I have one sister. Doris is sixteen months younger than I and is very different from me. When we were young, she was slim and I was fat. Because she was pale, mom dressed her in bright colors, especially red; I was rosy so my wardrobe was drab. She was athletic and could hit…
Not having a vision resulted in a web of difficulties, lost time, and tedious effort
I started this post over a month a ago, but decided to stop trying to solve my problems with connecting Twitter to Facebook so I could finish the book. Today, I released the book and wanted to tweet about it. I worked all evening to find a solution and still my tweets from the Jane…
Keeping up to date on tools is a necessity for the independent writer/self-publisher. I guess I have my work cut out.
Lately I have been studying about marketing and publishing the book. I have attended webinars and forums hoping to understand social media as a marketing tool. From these, I have a plethora of information about defining the audience, using and developing alluring words, and interacting with the reader. If I were to try to implement…
To communicate in an effective manner, limit the use of weak adverbs.
I have been reading about pros and cons of using adverbs. Erick Emert says that “using “ly” ending adverbs is BAD WRITING for fiction writers.” His reasons to avoid using adverbs make sense. MyEnglishTeacher.net on the other hand, suggests adding adverbs to make the writing more interesting. I use adverbs. To see how frequently I…