Up and Ready

My book Memograms: The Fun Way to Remember Hard-to-Spell Words is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble online, and the Apple iBookstore. Click any of the links in the text above or on the pictures to the right to go to those stores. It’s only 99¢ everywhere.

I took the extra time to specially format my book to work on all reader devices and smart phones, so you shouldn’t have any trouble viewing it, whether you have an Android, a Blackberry, a Sony, a Kobo, a Nook, an iPad, or any of the desktop apps that simulate an eReader on your computer. And it works in either black-and-white or color.

One place that it is not available is Smashwords. That is deliberate on my part. The extra trouble that I take to format my books correctly is not available to me if I distribute through Smashwords. They insist that writers send them a Word file, which Smashwords then runs through their own formatting program called “The Meatgrinder.” The results (which I have repeatedly looked at in books from other authors) are… to put it politely… less than “ideal.” They’re sometimes even less than that. However, in all fairness to Mark Coker (the owner of Smashwords) and his team, that may be partially the fault of the authors and how they format the Word files that they send to Smashwords.

I have read post after post on blogs from people who are just crying because they are desperate to figure out how to do their formatting. They have tried this-and-that and are just lost! I’ve also read posts from other people who have told them this-and-that to (supposedly) help them out, and their directions sound like advanced physics.

To see if I can help to remedy the situation, I am writing a new book. It’s called From Idea to E-Book: a 1-2-3-Easy Guide. It will tell you how, in a series of easy step-by-step instructions, how you can format your book to be the best that it can be for the widest variety of devices. It is really not that hard to do, but it is specific! You can’t be sloppy. But, if you can follow simple directions exactly, you can do it, and I can help. I have been both a computer systems engineer and a teacher of computer classes. I know how to make computer programs work and I also know how to make computers users understand new concepts and new ways of doing things. So I think that, if you want to learn how to format an e-book, and the other places you’ve looked haven’t helped very much, my book will be for you.

I will keep you posted here how it’s coming along and when it will be ready. Stay tuned, and if you know of other people who might need a book like this, send them over here, too.