Home stretch for first E-book

Well, I’m coming down the home stretch on the first of my Revisiting Scripture series. I’ve edited through it about three times now and my wife is going to go through it…in a printed form…once. I seldom have a big project  that isn’t in a hurry, so it was fun to apply some of the editing advice. I have The 28 Biggest Writing Blunders (And How to Avoid Them) by William Noble, and found his selection on eliminating ‘smoky words’ especially useful…very, just,rather,really…words that try to make a verb or noun stronger when they are stronger by themselves.

Then he is the first author to encourage extensive use of ellipsis (…) and dashes (–). They seem to make the compound sentences…and inserted thoughts…much easier to read.

Finally I turned ON the passive-voice detector in WORD…usually it is OFF due to being so annoying when first writing a draft…it slows me down to have to fix a sentence right in the middle of the original writing.

And then I went into the Kindle Direct Publishing pages and did the actual information entry. Everything is free and the royalty is 70% if you give them the exclusive–at least for 90 days.I debated using other platforms with multiple file formats but I’ll try this first. Since I prepared the book in WORD using their heading styles, the table of contents is easy to make and the book converts easily from .doc to .html to .mobi. I expect to offer it for $2.99…over 50,000 words. The cover is uploaded, but the editing has to finish before the first release. One feature…it seems very easy to upload a revision at any time…no cost at all and no one suggesting you shouldn’t do it. People who have already bought ‘edition 1″ can upload “edition 2” for free, so I don’t leave a customer stuck with the old version.

So it is getting closer!