The Book was better than the Movie

Old What’s her Face* and I left the house early today and went to the movies. It’s nice to take advantage of the matinee pricing. We went and saw Noah.

I was sucked in by a decent cast and flashy advertising.

What a disappointment. I didn’t expect much, and even those expectations were unrealized. Somehow, they wound up with stone Transformers building and defending the arc.

I admit, it’s been awhile since I read The Bible, but it was better. You can even get a free copy most places.

Save your money. You’ll thank me later. Think of all the cool ebooks you could download for the price of two tickets. You could still buy some microwave popcorn and have a great time.

* Not my wife’s real name.

Learning about formats

When I made the decision to self publish my books, I knew I’d have to go here someday. I went to Amazon, and they provide several free books, but none of them go where I need to go.

It seems I made the mistake of buying a Mac, and using the Pages program to write my stories. Don’t get me wrong, I like all my Apple products, but the rest of the world seems to have a problem with them. Most of the books are based around Microsoft Word.

I found a book called, “How to Format a Kindle Book on a Mac with iWork Pages.” I’m not finished with it yet, but it’s been pretty helpful.

I’m going to work my way through this, one novel at a time. I made several amateur mistakes, and I’ll have to pay for those one line at a time. I’m willing to do this, because I really like these stories. So far, doing things like turning off the page numbers has been easy.

It’s also good to read some of my work from prior years. I need to do more editing to make them worthy of readers. I am, again, willing to do the work.

I just learned of a November editing workshop in my home town. I signed up, and assume this will make my work even stronger.

I really want to start outlining another story, but putting this work off isn’t going to get me anywhere. You can bet I’ll change the format I write in for the next story. I can copy chunks for my critique group and change the spacing for them with ease.

Tomorrow is a holiday in the US. I expect to get some serious writerly work accomplished.

I know some of you have already walked this path, I see your tracks in the mud. What bits of advice can you give a newbie at formatting works for Amazon? I’ll tackle other platforms later.