Changes

I frequently meet authors who are struggling to be published by the traditional houses, but when I suggest self-publishing they explain that they don't have the big bucks required to go down that road with Author Solutions or Matador or their like. I then ask if they've considered Kindle and the answer is inevitably that they wouldn't know where to start. I can empathise with that. Despite having used a computer for about thirty years, running most of my life ''and'' a website on line, I'm still nervous when it comes to starting something new. I like someone to hold my hand as I go through it for the first time. That was why I was very interested when ''The Simple Act of Self Publishing With Amazon'' came across my desk. Author Georgianne Landy-Kordis doesn't profess to be a computer expert: she's simply someone who has done this many times and she's giving us the benefit of her experience and without any added chitchat.

We're not just looking at uploading to Kindle ebooks either. There's advice about formatting for a physical book complete with examples from Landy-Kordis's own work. At this point I decided that I would go through the process with her using a script which I work from at conferences. I found the formatting simple - what we're told is sensible, particularly if you are working in Word. What I was dreading was the question of the cover, but Landy-Kordis makes this feel easy. I even went looking at one of the sites she suggests and found the perfect image for a cover - and it was free.