You'll have to wait another day for the Gary Stu post. (Which will answer the question: What does James Bond, Jane Eyre and way too many horses have in common?) Life caught up with me this week, and though I had drafted the Mary Sue posts in advance, I had left this one for later thinking I had time. Alas, later has not arrived yet.
I decided instead that I needed to get my next short story collection finished and published. I'm prepping this a little differently -- using Word's style sheets differently, and more according to Hoyle, I believe. (I love style sheets. I adore InDesign and css. I HATE Word. I loathe Word. I really really really wish Smashwords would accept some other format. Like maybe ... html? Ya know? The universal format on which so many of the other formats are actually based?) But since I haven't done this yet, I am a little nervous of the results.
It will be a 99 cent collection, called "The Bellhound, Four Tales of Modern Magic." I'll offer it free for a month on Smashwords once it gets approved for the premium catalog, which takes a while. That, in turn, will make it free on the sites of their partners, like B&N, Sony, Apple and Kobo. Amazon may match it, though they rarely do. (I'm hoping that Smashwords will soon have a deal worked out with Amazon, which will allow us to offer things free just as we can at the other retailers.)
I've just got to rewrite my "about the author" blurb at the end, because the title story, "The Bellhound," has a tie-in to the YA fantasy I will be publishing in September or so.
Oh, and speaking of free books. I finally got B&N to offer Harsh Climate for free. It seems to be doing well. I will keep it free until the end of the month (though B&N may hold the price a little longer). In the meantime, Smashwords has it free as well.
Daring to live life as a full time writer, with or without success.
2 comments:
So funny. I can't do HTML to save my life, but despite every writer I know hating Word, it works for me. It's the only program that allows me any extra formatting I want but still feels like writing on a sheet of paper. But then, I'm a manual gig on it. I've got my templates and my settings and my custom toolbars and every automated feature except the auto corrects (that I've customized) turned OFF. So it stays out of my way. But tell me to get it done in HTML and I'm stuck.
Did finally find a workaround: Write/format in Word, copy/paste to a particular backend doc editor on a website which converts nicely (almost all the time), grab the generated HTML and go from there.
I don't write in Dreamweaver or other html applications. I prefer to write in plain text, frankly, although I use Word a lot.
What I hate is using Word for formatting, because it puts so much invisible JUNK into the document. You have little control.
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