Project Reissue--Part Two

 

          When it came to the technical part of getting my stories ready to publish again, I’ll admit I was challenged. Over the years of switching from typewriters to computers, I’d learned what I needed to in order to prepare a manuscript for submission, and to do the edits that may have followed. But learning how to get one ready for digital publication was a new ballgame. I knew other writers who were accomplishing it themselves. Certainly, I could do it, too. But I still hung back.

          I had been talking about this project of mine for sometime while I was doing the rewriting (which by the way meant typing all the stories I intended to e-publish into Word documents, as the only way they had been saved previously was either on old floppy disks or typewritten manuscripts). My family had heard all about it, and they were probably tired of listening to my angst over not being sure I could handle the technical part of it, a typical case of my making something harder than it actually is.

          It was my son-in-law who offered to help me put the stories up on Amazon. As a librarian, he wanted to offer a workshop at his library for patrons who might be interested in self-publishing e-books. In exchange for letting him use my book of short stories as an example of how to do it, he would do the actual formatting of my book and make sure it was ready to upload. It was totally a win-win proposition, and it spurred me on to get the first stories rewritten and ready to publish again.

          I chose five stories for the first e-book and decided to give it the title An Uncommon Prince, which had been my original title for one of the stories when I’d first written it. The theme for this book was that the heroes were all a little out of the ordinary but still were heroes in their walks of life.

          Next time I’ll talk about finding a cover for An Uncommon Prince.