I had been toying with the idea of seeking a bigger audience for those four time travel stories that I’ve blogged about over the past month. So deciding to act rather than dither, I packed them up into a tidy little anthology called Time Quadrants.
The first step was laying them out in InDesign just as if I were going to publish a bound book. It made a tidy little package, with about a 100 pages or so of actual text. However, sending it to the printer was never my goal here. I wanted to hit the ebook markets with a dirt cheap price and see if I could reach people who never saw the tweets or the blogs.
I exported the book from InDesign to the Dreamweaver format, with was just HTML. I cleaned that up and added the kindle-specific features like page breaks between stories, etc. I trimmed the graphics down to bare bones grayscale versions and put together a simple cover in Illustrator. This was an exercise in getting a product out with a minimum of expense. I didn’t want a large setup cost that I’d have to consider when setting the price.
After uploading and testing the book in Kindle’s DTP site, I gave it a 99-cent price tag and turned it loose. I’ll do the same as a mobi-format book to the independent distributors as soon as I work out a technical glitch (FTP isn’t working on my network). If I get an indication of demand for it, I’ll add other formats.
I suppose if it is well received, I might produce a paper copy, but that has to wait for now. I can’t match the low-end pricing once I start that route.
So, if you have kindle-toting buddies, or if the idea of a convenient package appeals to you, click here and head over to the Amazon site.