An Adventure In Self-Publishing – POST #6

April 27, 2014

The first major step in my self-publishing adventure is nearly complete.

Bloodridge is now loaded into Bowkers (for the ISBN Numbers for the CreateSpace paper, Nook epub and Kindle mobi ebook versions), and Ingrams / Spark (paper book sales through brick and mortar bookstores). As soon as these listings are confirmed, the CreateSpace entry will show in my Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) page, and then I can upload the mobi version to KDP. At that point, Bloodridge will be available for reviewers, and for the general public on June 14. The folks at Booknook.biz were very helpful in setting everything up so my work would be straightforward.

Sometime early next week, I expect to see the copyedited version of DeathByte sent to me by my copyeditor, Karl Yambert. I'll read his questions and reply, probably in three days. Then he'll send me the final copyedited version, and I can forward that on to Booknook.biz. Meanwhile, my cover designer, Jeroen Ten Berge should be completing the cover designs (paper and ebook)  for DeathByte by the end on next week, and after I approve them, they also get sent to Booknook.biz. If things go well, DeathByte will be ready for its upload in two weeks, ready for reviewers, pending it's pub date on July 12.

Then, on to Swiftshadow, due for release on August 2. When that one is done, I will have created an entire summer's reading list for thriller devotees.

Then, I can take a more leasurely pace with the other three, which will be made available for summer 2015. To make next year less hectic, I'll work on those over the following months (autumn).

The cost of all this was about $10,000 for three books. Publicity and web site redesign were more, and by that I mean a ton of cashish more.

Yes, I could have done it on the cheap. But I hope that paying for quality means I'm delivering an excellent product to reader.

Now, back to work...

An Adventure In Self-Publishing – POST #5

Now, finally... Bloodridge, the first title in the "Spies Lie" series is almost complete. The cover, by Jeroen Ten Berge, is done. The copyediting, by Karl Yambert, is done. The formatting into PDF for the Ingram's / LightningSource and CreateSpace print versions of the book is done, by Booknook.biz. All I'm waiting on now is Booknook.biz's formatting of the book into epub and mobi versions for Nook and Amazon.

So far, I'm impressed with the result. My publicist, Brandi Andres, has helped arrange guest columns in the Huffington Post on political and technology issues. To help with "discoverability,"  I've asked several authors I know (or who I've been directed to by other authors I know) to write reviews or blurbs, and now I'm waiting on them. In just a few days, I'll be offering the ebook version to readers who promise reviews on Goodreads and my Amazon author's page (which I must now create).

The total cost for all this is within 15% of my budget. And, I'll make my target date of June 14 for Bloodridge's release.

So, with the pre-release work on Bloodridge now complete, I'll begin focus on book 2, DeathByte. As the song says, "The road goes on forever and the party never ends..."

Heartbleed implications regarding security of your personal data

April 11, 2014

Take a look at my article on @HuffPostTech - http://huff.to/1ncz1vv