I'm on Kindle

I know I've been very quite lately, in big part due to my hands, but also because I've been busy getting my book, First Light, ready to put onto Kindle.

The longest struggle has been creating a new book cover. Last time I had to go with the Printer/Publisher choice of this...

Dull "blaaah" cover. :( Back when this first came out I did my own artwork to create bookmarks and a YouTube video as advertising. At least here I had a chance to create something I liked.

This time I wanted something that really expressed what the book is about - the world and its people. So I worked on created a city that fitted the capital city and that took AGES, but I'm really thrilled with the results. I even got in the dock front (far right), where two of the main characters are destined to meet up. :-)

Then I added in the mountains, which are important, and the two moons, because they're fun and point out that this world isn't Earth, and then I added Daen's face, because she just brings it all together. The fonts gave me grief too. I forgot the fact that Amazon link pictures are thumbnails - on a thumbnail my first font vanished and my second became a blob. :-(

So... FINALLY, after months of slow and painful work, (painful thanks to my hands and my fusy arty perfectionism!) here it is, my new cover:

The actual book (writing) transference was... interesting. They tell you it's a case of take your word doc, save it as html webpage, send it to them, but inbetween lies a whole range of formatting and coding errors that can boil your brain! Hubby and I took two full days to get the manuscript completely error free. Then I had to wait as Amazon checks all the legalities, such as "do you really own this book?", "Do you have publishing rights?", etc.

Well... it is finally up, on ALL the Amazon Kindle stores from the America to France. :-)

I even have an author page!

I'm so thrilled, and so relieved all my months of hard work has finally reached an end. Now the equally hard, but more fun side begins - advertising! Amazon already has me connected to Shelfari, which was very nice of them. I want to update my YouTube video for the book with a new, better version, but I promise not to leave my blog so ghostly empty this time.