Sheila Rambles

There's a sound that Apple programs make, a chime of three ascending notes, that signals that something has been successfully brought to completion.  It's the sound you hear when a program has finished installation or a CD has been fully uploaded to iTunes. I never knew that sound could be as delightful and terrifying as it was when it rang out to inform me that the upload of my book for purchase via iTunes had gone through. I resorted to using Pages to translate my words into EPUB format, which was a touch more aggravating than I would have liked and forced me to relinquish a great deal of control over how I wanted it to look.  But once I relaxed and put my emphasis on the words I wrote rather than my font and formatting choices, it fell into place a little more easily.  I can only hope that those willing to lay down the ninety-nine cents to purchase this wee book will be forgiving of any lingering twonkiness in the layout. I'm guessing that the folks at Apple will...

Catbooks and Other Methods has sold a handful of copies on the Kindle but I've been putting off doing any serious promotion of it until after I'd gotten the EPUB version up and running in the iTunes Bookstore. Unfortunately, I've also been putting off the "getting the EPUB version up and running" part as well. Part of it is my usual procrastinative tendencies but the main reason is that Apple is the opposite of Amazon in terms of ease of publication. Publication for the Kindle can be summed up in three steps: 1. Write a book. 2. Set up a Kindle Direct Publishing account. [Steps one and two can be done in either order, to be honest.] 3. Upload your book. That's all you have to do. This is both good news and bad news, as this means that the book you spent ages perfecting is sharing space with the sorts of manuscripts that would normally be languishing in a publisher's slush pile and the ebook equivalents of SEO spam. It takes a lot o...