After the Challenge…

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It’s over!

What a ride!

I’m kind of happy about what I’ve managed to accomplish (3 new Kindle books up, with several others in the pipeline; a move to a new house; kept the Challenge site going and… oh, a bunch of other stuff that I’m too tired to think about!) but I can’t help wishing that I’d had time to get just one other Kindle book up. Still.. that’s on my list for this week, now!

How did you go, guys? Post your replies… and then head on over to the new Writing Challenges site and pick yourself something for this week! (Oh, unless you’re having a rest of course. You’re allowed to do that!)

Cheers

Marg

 

CreateSpace Publishing Kit

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CreateSpace Publishing Kit There’s no doubt that e-publishing platforms like Amazon’s Kindle are changing the face of publishing – forever.

However, there are still many thousands of readers who prefer to read a paperback, rather than an e-book. (And there are more who like to download an e-book so they can get it instantly, then order the print version as well to keep on a bookshelf!)

Until relatively recently, self-publishing a print book could be a very expensive exercise. Authors had to pay a graphic designer to create a cover and lay out the book, then they had to add the cost of printing and shipping. Quite often, they had to agree to a print run of 500 or a thousand books.

Then came POD (Print on Demand) publishing, which was a huge move forward. Authors could order just a few books at a time, or simply leave it to the buyer to order a book at a time. However, self-publishing could still be expensive, because of design costs.

At last, Amazon CreateSpace has made self-publishing a print book simple – and inexpensive. Authors can make their book available to Amazon customers ‘on demand’ – and need pay only for a preview copy to ensure that everything is okay.

Even so, new authors still sometimes find it intimidating to embark on the self-publishing path with CreateSpace. That’s why the CreateSpace Publishing Kit came into being. You’ll find a PDF that walks you through the whole process of publishing with CreateSpace, as well as templates in Microsoft Word and Open Office that ensure your book is laid out properly. Finally, there is a checklist so you can be confident that you’ve left nothing out!

I’ve bought the resale rights to the CreateSpace Publishing Kit and, as I did with the Kindle Publishing Kit, I’m making it available for the duration of the 10 Week Writer’s Challenge for only $7.99. (But since I didn’t get around to putting it up until halfway through the last week, I’ll leave it there for four weeks after the Challenge finishes – that is, until July 14. Then it will go back to the recommended retail price of $17.00.)

Read more about the CreateSpace Publishing Kit here.

 

 

Week Ten

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Week 10 of the 10 Week Writer's ChallengeWe’re actually here! This is the very last week. Who would have thought that ten weeks would fly by this quickly?

(But don’t worry. I have something in the wings for those of you who need to have an ongoing ‘challenge’ to keep you honest. I’ll tell you about it at the end of this week.)

I barely had time to peek at the Challenge site last week, because it turned out to be full of packing and exploring old boxes and throwing stuff out and organising pick-ups of unwanted furniture, etc etc etc (and going to see a performance of Peter Pan in which my eldest grandchild was a pirate (Friday night); a birthday party for another grandchild (Saturday afternoon) plus watching two others in their very first dance recital (Sunday afternoon) it’s a wonder I’m still standing.

getting files from floppy disksHOWEVER… cleaning out years of stuff that has been stored and forgotten can be very rewarding. I’d given up on ever finding some of my old (finished) fiction that I wanted to turn into Kindle books… and then I found a box of old floppy disks. Eureka! But… I didn’t have a floppy disk drive any more! Until I tried eBay. I posted about it here, on the Write A Kindle Book blog.

I also downloaded and read two books for writers – I recommend you have a look at both. One was written for Indie authors, all about using Twitter for promotion: Giving the Bird: The Indie Author’s Guide to Twitter by Benjamin Wallace. It’s packed full of useful advice. The other is Be The Monkey: A conversation about the new world of publishing by Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath. I’ll do reviews for both of these on my Kindle book site later in the week, but go and read excerpts on Amazon now – especially Be the Monkey. You’ll find out exactly why Barry Eisler knocked back a two-book contract worth HALF A MILLION dollars in favour of publishing with Kindle.

(Note: the book images below are not clickable links. They just show you what the covers look like. Use the links in the paragraph above to check out the books on the Amazon site.)

Giving the Bird and Be the Monkey books

Giving the Bird and Be the Monkey books

Since I was smart enough last week to write down goals for the last TWO weeks, not last week, I’m actually not behind! Hah. Tomorrow I have to sit around for an indefinite period waiting for a local charity to pick up unwanted furniture, so I’m planning on doing a lot of work at the computer then.

Over to you, guys… what do you want to achieve in this last week?

This is Why….

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Hi all.

A few minutes ago, I stepped back from the mess that was once my office, and thought: I’d better put up a quick post and let everyone know why I’m not very active this week.

Then I thought: Nope, I’ll just take a photo. Here it is:

Packing to move house

You can see why I’m not sitting with my butt in the chair writing and blogging and uploading etc etc… I can barely SEE my desk.(I don’t usually operate in these conditions. Promise.) I’ve just emptied everything out of the filing cabinet and storage drawers to sort, throw out, or pack. Naturally it all got piled up on my desk first…

Looks like this is kinda my ‘mental health’ week by default.

I will catch up soon.. promise! By the end of today, I hope to have a clean desk. It’ll be nice to type without shoving a pile of papers away with my elbow.

Back to packing….no, you know what? First I’m going to take 15 minutes to have a cuppa and a sit down. YEAH!!!!

 

SEVERAL HOURS LATER….

Packing up: Getting there...

BETTER!

Marg :-)

Week Nine

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Week 9 of the 10-Week Writer's ChallengeDo you realise that at the end of next week, this Challenge has finished?

At the beginning, 10 weeks seemed like a loooooong time. Just goes to show how quickly time passes. (And that realisation brings with it two messages:

  1. No matter how difficult a challenge seems, as long as you know the start and end dates, it will come to an end.
  2. If you don’t commit to finishing a task, it will never get done. In terms of writing a book, this means that you can procrastinate forever, thinking: “I’ll put aside a block of time later…” and later never comes.

As I’ve kept saying during this Challenge, it doesn’t matter if you adjust your goals.What matters is that you KEEP GOING FORWARD.

What can you achieve in the next 2 weeks?

How about setting yourself a mini challenge for the last two weeks? Think of it as a brand new challenge – but this time, it’s just 14 days. Or to be precise, until the end of June, it’s a day or two less than that (depending on whether you’re in the northern or southern hemisphere.)

In the next two weeks, I intend to:

  1. Upload a CreateSpace Publishing Kit for those who would like to create a physical book on Amazon’s CreateSpace to go with their Kindle e-book
  2. Finish and upload The Busy Writer’s One-Hour Character to Kindle
  3. Move house (!!!!!)

Now I’m going to go and pack a few boxes. I’m working on just a few each day.

As usual, it’s over to you… what do you plan on accomplishing by the end of next week?

Marg :-)

Andreea Ayers on Pinterest for Authors

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Andreea Ayers has tips for Pinterest Boards for AuthorsYou might already have heard that Pinterest is the fastest-growing social media outlet around. You may also have heard that it is driving more traffic to websites than other services that have been around for years.

BUT… you’re probably also asking (like many other writers) “How does Pinterest benefit authors? What kinds of things can I put on Pinterest boards – apart from my book covers?”

Andreea Ayers has put together a one-page PDF that suggests different ways that authors might tap into the power of Pinterest.

Who is Andreea? Well, for a start she is an author: in 2009 she wrote T-Shirt Profits: The Complete Guide to Starting Your Own Successful T-shirt Business after leaving the corporate world of marketing and doing exactly what the title suggests: starting a T-Shirt business. She started with 96 t-shirts in 2007, and after four years had sold over 20,000 t-shirts in over 300 stores in the United States, with six figure sales after only one year of running my business.

Andreea freely admits that she made a lot of mistakes along the way – such as spending a LOT of money on PR with negligible results. Armed with a surer knowledge of what did work, Andreea sold Tees for Change and now focuses on teaching people how to get their products in the media and how to increase online exposure and sales.

So… wanna know Andreea’s suggestions for using Pinterest? Right-click here to download a copy of Pinterest Board Ideas for Authors, and if you want to know more, for a limited time you can sign up for Andreea’s free webinar.

Creating Header Graphics

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With most WordPress themes (including the one I like to use, Weaver II) you can upload custom-made header graphics.

I usually create my own – but I have a lot of help! I used XHeaderPro to create the header graphics for the 10-Week Challenge site and for my main site (Writing4Success) but I used The Logo Creator to build the header for Write A Kindle Book.

These are the two headers I created using XHeaderPro:

Header_Writing4Success

Header Graphic 10 Week Wrier's Challenge

This is the header I created using The Logo Creator:

Header Graphic for Write a Kindle Book

I had to resize the graphics to fit my sites, but that was easily done.

XHeaderPro

I started off using the free version of XHeader (which is absolutely brilliant for free software) but I upgraded to XHeader Pro so I could have access to many more header designs. You can use this to create banners for your website, covers for your books, and more. (You can resize the ‘header’ so it’s a square of any size, so you can pretty much make what you want.)

Here are the links to both versions:

XHeader (free software)

XHeaderPro (many more images and backgrounds, comes at a cost)

Finally, I have written an article on using XHeader here, giving more examples.

The Logo Creator

If you like messing about with graphics, you’ll love the Logo Creator. Sure, you can create logos… for yourself and clients… but I use it to create little graphics that I can use all over my websites. I created the header for the Write a Kindle Book website, but I also used it to create the graphics you see every week for the posts from Weeks 1 – 10, at the beginning of each week.

The new improved version of the Logo Creator has been out a couple of months now, and it’s terrific. You can buy extra logo sets to go with it, if you want to – but you can use the basics that you get with the program, and import any .png file with a transparent background to use on your graphics.

Go here to see what The Logo Creator can do.

 

Week Eight

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Week 8 of the 10-Week Writer's ChallengeONLY THREE WEEKS TO GO!

You might be thrilled with what you have accomplished in the past seven weeks.

You might be disappointed, because you feel you ‘should’ have done more.

Here’s what I want you to do.

Leave the computer. Go make a cuppa – tea, coffee, hot water… whatever floats your boat. Give yourself permission to have a Tim-Tam with it, if you really want to let your hair down. Then grab a notepad and pen.

Now take fifteen minutes to sit down and list ALL the things you’ve managed to get done over the past 7 weeks – writing, and all the other things that you had to do as well.

It’s a pretty big list, isn’t it?

You have to admit that you have managed to achieve one heck of a lot in seven weeks. You’re not a superhero – leastways, I don’t think you are – so you can be pretty pleased at getting it all done.

And there are still three weeks left!

Before you go back to your computer, there’s one thing left to do.

Decide on the most important thing you want to achieve in the next three weeks. BE REALISTIC. If you know you haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of finishing the book, then make your goal to finish the next three chapters, or scenes.

Told you this was a flexible challenge, didn’t I?

So far today I have:

  • tested a product on DLGuard (it works! Yay!) and written a blog post on it here
  • phoned a removalist and walked around the house with him while he gathered the info for his quote
  • phoned the shop where I bought a new fridge and arranged to have it delivered to our new property
  • patted Rob on the back while he negotiated various phone menus (“If you want to install a new service, press one. If you want to cancel a service, press two. If you….”) to get utilities installed at the new house
  • stopped for a cup of coffee
  • responded to comments on the 10-Week Writer’s Challenge blog
  • started this post

For the rest of the day, I plan to transfer my other products to DLGuard and do some work on my next book for Kindle, and I want to put something up on the new Kindle site about the results of my Kindle promotion. Oh, and about some great books I found on Kindle.

So, guys… how are you all going????

Uploading Photos to WordPress

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Uploading photos to WordPress is really, really easy!

Step by step, here’s what I did to upload a photo to the home page of my Write a Kindle Book site

  1. I started by resizing the photo in Irfanview. It’s a good idea to have web-ready photos in a smaller size/resolution, so your web pages load faster.
  2. Then I placed the cursor in the line where I wanted the graphic to appear, and clicked on the little camera icon next to the words “Upload/Insert”, just above the menu bar. (Note: I actually want the picture to appear on the right, but I can control that in the next step.)

    Step One Uploading images in WordPress

  3. An “Add media” dialogue box will appear. You can choose to either drag and drop an image into the box,or find the image on your computer…

    Step 2 uploading photos to WordPress

  4. Locate the image on your computer and double click it to upload (or click the button that says ‘open file’)

    Step 3 Uploading images in WordPress

  5. The image will appear in the box when it has uploaded successfully. Now you can choose the SIZE of the image and its ALIGNMENT (none – which means it will fit in between lines of text – left, centre or right).

    Step 5 Uploading images to WordPress

  6. Now your image will appear in your post. If you want to change the alignment, click image and then click on the picture in the corner. You can also delete the image if you don’t want it after all.

    Step 6 Uploading an Image to WordPress

Ta-da! That’s all there is to it.

 

Using WordPress to Create a Website

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How to Turn Your WordPress Blog into a WebsiteOK, I know it’s taken me a while to finish this… I blame winter germs! I’m now back on track and I managed to finish a PDF document that walks you through setting up a WordPress blog with a Weaver II theme so you have something that looks pretty much like a standard website. (And yes, you can control the ‘comments’ that you usually find on blogs.)

You’ll find it on the Resources page.

Conveniently, I was ready to set up a new website especially for people who were keen on learning more about publishing on Kindle – so I used that as my demo!

Now I look forward to seeing some of your results!