Putting it all together, Covers, formatting, et al

I've loved writing time travel romances. I began writing them back in the late 80's, then put them aside for a long time as no one really wanted to see them. (No one meaning traditional publishers and agents at the time. They said it was a dead market).

Now with the eBook evolution and readers picking what they really want to read from a wide and diverse ebook market, the sky's the limit. That's why I decided to break out my time travel trilogy.

It all began when a friend suggested at the beginning of this year, that I really concentrate on what brings me joy. I had stopped writing for about 8 years after some personal issues. It was strange to me since I've always written through the years, ever since I was about 12 or so. Trust me, that's many, many years ago. But I said the one constant in my life has always been writing. So I began to do some research on the ebook market and wow, was I surprised by what I found.

I decided this was the perfect venue to introduce my books to the readers. So exciting. So I totally went through all my manuscripts and said I'm putting them out there and see what sticks.  I had the covers professionally created by Julie McClen of Australia, Oak Grove Graphics, and she also redid my author website for me, Grace Brannigan.com which I just love the design. I had Kelly Para do some copyedits for me on the contemporary romances and check for cohesiveness and story flow of the manuscripts.

Then, I began researching places to have my Word document converted to Kindle format, and then ePub format for Smashwords. That's when I stumbled upon Calibre which does a lot of format conversions, but I only use it for Kindle to create a mobi file. It's a free download here Calibre-ebook Download. Then I stumbled upon Heather Adkins website which she gives a tutorial on how to create an ePub file for Smashwords. She's also an author and a police dispatcher. She does a fantastic job on the tutorial.  Cyberwitch Press.

There's  lots of other resources I found, but these are the main ones I've been using. Now I have a different copy editor since Kelly got really busy and I'm very happy with Sarah. I just got Soulmates Through Time back from her and I'm working through those edits to fix the story where it needs some bandaids.

So much time, but labors of love. So now once Soulmates is up, I will have 6 eBooks on Kindle, Smashwords, B&N and Kobo. Very exciting. The last and final book in the time travel trilogy is 1/2 written, Treasure So Rare. I hope to have that available some time in 2013.