“For all we know he was her killer,” Glenda replied softly.
“Yep, that is true. Glenda, where’s all this leading? What would we do if we did find this guy?”
Chapter 9, Eye of the Magpie
As the Queen of Formatting, I have to admit it was a daunting process to upload my book to Amazon. I had taken an intense self-publishing course through our local library that helped me tremendously. AND it still took me almost two months to upload my book. :^(
The first hurdle was errors in my manuscript. I click through all of them. Some are typos in dialogue, and I tell the reviewer to ignore them. If I remember right, I think I had two actual spelling mistakes, and I think that is pretty darn good. I correct and then reload my document. That Folks, takes maybe an hour of time. The rest of the saga involves my struggles with the book cover. It is a bit of a comedy of errors.
The lovely Joelle Johnson, of Saskatoon fame, did a beautiful piece of artwork for me for my cover. In the top left-hand corner there is an angry magpie, coming in for a landing. Below it we see, through a rifle scope, our two intrepid sleuths, engaged in conversation. There is a red wash over the whole page, some dripping down menacingly towards the women.
Neither Joelle nor I had ever created a book cover before. My first realization was that the format of the picture was wrong. The watercolour is a slight rectangle, closer to a square. A standard book cover is six inches by nine inches, a taller rectangle.
I have never mastered a graphic software like Photoshop; I have used simple, free-ones successfully that I have found on the web in the past, to resize a picture or take out red eye. I thought it would be easy enough to do some photo editing, say with cropping. Not so fast.
Programs that I used in the past were no longer available. I did a bit of research and found GIMP 2.10. It is not simple. It has a lot of icons that I haven’t got a clue what they mean or what they do. But it is free. I spend a day or two experimenting with various buttons and perusing their online manual and finally come up with this:
Then I upload my book cover to Amazon, fill in a bunch of boxes, find out I need a TIN number for US taxation purposes, contact another Canadian author who goes Huh?, Contact my accountant, who knows exactly what I am talking about and informs me no, I don’t need a TIN. figure out a way for Amazon to pay me, and my e-Book is uploaded. But … Amazon takes 72 hours to review it before it finally pops up in their store.