Happy Mother's Day and Other News

Hope all the moms out there are having a wonderful day. My day began with breakfast in bed made by my husband and son, along with my daughter's special contribution: chocolate covered strawberries, which should, in my humble opinion, be their own food group. They are one of my all-time FAVORITE things. I also received some candy and flowers and a HUGE card declaring me the best mom ever. Since my kids are 16 and 13 I suppose I should count myself as fortunate that they still think so with all my many rules and restrictions that make their lives so miserable. Hey, that's my job, right?

As a special offering to all the moms, I'm offering my book GEORGIA ON MY MIND as a Kindle freebie this weekend. If you've already read GEORGIA, then you know that the loss of my own mother, now almost eight years ago, featured prominently in this story. Much of what Georgie Quinn goes through after losing her mother mirrored my experiences. There's also a cast of irascible senior citizens in this book that are fashioned after my dad and his hilarious group of friends. And finally, you get three romances for the price of one when the Caldwell brothers meet Georgie and her two roommates. Get it for free here until Tuesday. If you have a Nook, Kobo or iPad and want to read Georgia, you can download the free Kindle app to any device with an internet connection and get the free copy.

In other news, I was excited to hear this week that Harlequin will be bringing out the Fatal Series in mass market paperback under the HQN imprint starting in the fall of 2013 and going forward from there. I'm looking forward to gaining some new readers of the series through this offering, and I signed on for two more books in the series, Fatal Attack and Fatal Mistake. I'm looking forward to getting back to work on Fatal Attack when I get the recovered items off my damaged hard drive--hopefully by Tuesday of this week. What an ordeal that turned out to be. Note to all who rely on computers: back up more often than I did and don't drop your laptop.

Have a great Sunday!

Dear Diary: Much to Report

Hope everyone had a nice Valentine's Day! Ours was very nice with flowers and candy and a nice dinner with the kids. We talked about going out but the idea of dealing with crowds and slow service wasn't appealing. Maybe we'll go out tonight instead. I'm all for any plan that involves me NOT cooking!

One of the members of my Fatal Series Readers Group wondered what Sam and Nick were doing for Valentine's Day. So I penned a little story that features Sam taking the lead on romance's biggest day. Yes, you read that right! SAM is taking the lead for once. If you'd like to find out whether or not she pulled it off, join the group and click on the "Docs" tab at the top. I also just revealed the name of the book that will follow Fatal Attack to the group! I spent my gym time today pondering the murder mystery for the next book, and wondering if there's something wrong with me because I get a charge out of thinking up new ways to kill people. Hmmm.... Lots of fun stuff coming up for Sam and Nick! I'd like to know if the 2500-word Valentine's Day story counts toward my word count for yesterday. The husband says no. I say yes. LOL! I made some good progress on FATAL ATTACK yesterday, and I like the direction this one is taking.

On the McCarthy front, the copy editor reported in last night that book 5, HOPING FOR LOVE, is her favorite one yet. Yay! She said, "Well, I think I said the last book was the best one yet, but I was wrong, because THIS ONE is the best one yet! OMG, love, love, loved it." Thank you Linda Ingmanson! Linda does a great job editing my self-published books, and I love working with her.

I'm pleased and excited that TRUE NORTH is now available in print. I'm working on getting all of my self-published books available in print, so watch for the McCarthys in print, coming soon! Will post the links here and on my website when I have them.

A couple of updates from yesterday: Thanks to my Facebook friends, I figured out why the iPhone wasn't ringing. I'm now intimate with my mute switch. Who knew? Thanks to everyone who helped! I'm getting the hang of it, and I know I will like it. Eventually. On the home front, Louie is settling in nicely and Brandy seems to be getting used to her new "brother." They love to wrestle and chase each other around the house. He's fit right in like he's always been here, which is great. Dan had a feeling about him, and I have to say he was right! (Don't tell him I said that though.... LOL)

I want to talk a little bit today about pre-orders and why some of my books aren't available for pre-order and others are. The simple truth is that Amazon and other retailers don't yet offer pre-order capability to self-published authors. I really hope that will change before too much longer. This means the new McCarthy book won't be available for pre-order, but will go on sale on the designated release day in March (still to be determined) and not before. I wish this wasn't how it worked, and I've talked to Amazon about changing the policy, but no movement yet. The Fatal Series books are published by a division of Harlequin. Since traditional publishers are the only ones who can do pre-orders, that is why the Fatal books have been available for pre-order when the others are not. I hope that sheds some light on the behind the scenes situation. I know this is frustrating for a lot of readers. Believe me, it's frustrating for me too because I answer a LOT of questions about this issue! Here's hoping there will be a change in this policy before too much longer!

Have a great day!

Self-Publishing Tips for the Uninitiated

I've been reading a lot lately on the published author loops about people paying BIG bucks to have their books formatted for self-publishing on Amazon, B&N and Smashwords. I've now posted five books with a sixth on the way later this month, so I thought I'd share a few lessons learned to help out those who are just venturing into this new territory. I'm not certainly not claiming to be any kind of expert at this. I've been to the school of trial and error. But since I've had no complaints from readers on the formatting of my books, I take that as good sign! I hope this information will save my fellow authors some money. Please watch out for people who are looking to profit by charging outrageous fees for this service. If I can do it, you can too!

First of all, don't panic. It's easier than you think. Here are a few critical steps to start with:

1. Set your paragraph indents to 0.33". To do that in Word, select all your text, go to Format - Paragraph. Under "Special" choose "First line" and then put 0.33 in the dialogue box. This will also indent your chapter headings. You can undo the chapter heading formatting by backspacing (at least on a Mac you can).

2. Only after you have completed step one, remove all your tabs. Do this by using the Find and Replace function in word. Find: ^t and Replace: leave blank. Replace all. I'm going to say this in all caps so there's no chance you can miss it: MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SET THE PARAGRAPH INDENTS BEFORE YOU REMOVE THE TABS. If you do these two steps in the wrong order, you may lose all your paragraph indents.

3. Insert page breaks at the end of every chapter and after your front matter (title page, copyright statement, etc.). To do this in Word, go to Insert - Break - Page Break. This is critical as it will ensure that your chapters flow smoothly in the ebook.

4. Another thing you can do to make your text flow smoothly is remove all those pesky second spaces after periods. To do that, again use the Find and Replace function. Find: hit the space bar twice. Replace: hit the space bar once. Replace all. Repeat until you have 0 replacements.

Front matter/copyright statement
You must include a copyright statement with each book. While most traditionally published ebooks have these statements in the back of the book, I've found the upload process goes more smoothly *especially with Smashwords* when the copyright statement is placed at the beginning of the book. Here's the statement I adapt for all my books:

Book Name
My Name
Published by My Name
Copyright YEAR. My Name.
Cover by INSERT DESIGNER

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to (INSERT COMPANY) and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at marie@marieforce.com.

All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination.

www.mariesullivanforce.com

I do a different version for each e-retailer so the name of the company is correct for each one. For Smashwords, use this boilerplate at the beginning:

Book Name
Published by Your Name
Copyright YEAR. Your Name.
Cover by XXXX
Smashwords Edition

You need "Smashwords Edition" there or the Smashwords meat grinder won't accept your MS. Another important thing to remember with Smashwords is that your manuscript must be in "Final" format. To determine whether yours is FINAL, in Word, go to View - Toolbars - Reviewing. On the far left side of the Reviewing Toolbar, you will see a box that contains the status of your manuscript. It may say Final Showing Markup, Original Showing Markup, Final, etc. Make sure you accept all your changes, turn OFF the track changes function and set your manuscript to FINAL. I have found that it's easier to keep the file OPEN as I upload the FINAL version to Smashwords. For some reason it reverts to SHOWING FINAL MARKUP after I close the document. Why? I have no idea! Another interesting thing I learned recently about Smashwords has to do with including excerpts for future books in the back of the current book. If "Chapter 1" appears twice in your book, it sends the meat grinder into fits and your book may be rejected. So, eliminate the Chapter 1 heading on the excerpt to avoid this issue.

Helpful hint for Smashwords: You'll need an ISBN to be included in Smashwords' premium catalog. You want your book to be in the catalog to gain distribution to iBooks and Sony. Smashwords offers free ISBNs, but I chose to buy my own so I can take them with me if I decide not to publish with Smashwords any longer. Bowker sells ISBN numbers. I bought a package of 10 ISBNs for $250 because I knew I would use them all eventually. If you don't think you'll need that many, you can pay as you go. It's a bit of a chore to fill out the online ISBN form, but well worth the time to make sure you have an ISBN that you can use anywhere you need it.

Helpful hint for Amazon: Save your final file as an "Web Page: HTM" file. Do this in Word by clicking on Save As, in the pull down screen for FORMAT you will find Web Page HTM as an option. Amazon has advised me that saving in this format eliminates a lot of uploading issues. It worked perfectly when I tried it whereas the .doc format was problematic.

Another helpful hint for Amazon: Once your book is showing up online, go to Author Central and log in. If you don't have an Author Central account, you'll want to get one. (For one thing, we now have access to Bookscan numbers through Author Central for print books.) Once you're logged in, click on "Books" and under there you can "add" the new book so it appears on your Author Page. This is critical to boosting sales. If readers are looking for more of your work, that's where they're going to look. Once you've identified the book as one of yours, it can take a day or two to show up on your page.

Final word of caution: be careful forking out money to people and/or companies who are looking to take you for a ride. There's a whole cottage industry cropping up around self-publishing and e-books. Make sure you aren't paying for something you could easily do yourself.

I'm happy to answer any questions, so feel free to fire away!