Ctrl+ yourself woman

After a whole night and day of extracting, pasting, formatting and re-formatting uploading, being kicked out and reformatting again, I decided to give up using the online templates and create the whole damn thing myself. What damn thing? Why, the actual book to complete the Egyptian Collection series of course! The 32 page full colour soft-back glossy book that in 48 hours will be availble to buy the world over. It's quite exciting in a sad sort of way. It's no best seller category work - it's just a simple idea I had to raise some money and awareness for the MS Society. But to see my name on the cover of a book and maybe sell a few copies of something all my own work, it's exciting. Many thanks to my sister for her immediate and accurate explantion of how to get around a software shortcoming - worked a treat and saved me hours of annoyance.

The book will be the big daddy to the Kindle books of smaller designs. I've sold a few copies of those but not enough to write home about.  Need to look into some marketing strategies.  It's not for my personal gain so I'm quite unashamed to keep plugging away.  If only everyone would realise the way to shut me up is to buy a copy of at least one of the publications, it would be so much better all round.  On that note, here are some handy links:

I've been amazed just how easy both publication processes have been.  I had the content already; have had it for years just sitting on the hard drive doing nothing.  All it took was following some guidelines and uploading.  It was a bit like being at work really.  Second nature to create a document, format it according to rules and upload it through an online publishing tool.  Of course I got to choose a lot more of the options, but it's an eerily similar process.

It took a long time, eyes not co-operating (with each other never mind with me), scrolling pages kicking off a swimming head into the deep end, but I've been able to keep at it and that's progress.  That just hasn't been possible for a long time.  A little more work on physical strength and normality is not far off.  That's quite exciting too in its equally sad little way.

There'll no doubt be another post in less than 48 hours to extoll the virtues of buying my book for the good of mankind.  All proceeds to the MS Society on that one too - now to tackle the next job - learning how best to market these products without spending any (excessive) money to do so.  Check out the books, blog them, tweet them, share them on facebook, whatever it is you do to spread the word on anything.  It's for a very good cause that otherwise doesn't get much publicity.  If I figure out the best way to harness the power of social networking, I'll publish a book about it.