Published at Last

​It’s done. I made it!
 
Sword of the Feara is now published and available as a paperback from Amazon and as an e-book from Amazon and several other sellers. Someone asked me this week if self-publishing was hard. The answer to that is yes and no.
 
For e-books, it’s really an unqualified yes. Amazon and Draft2Digital allow you to just upload a word doc and they do the rest. There was a little wrangling for me because I have a map, which needs some tweaking to make it look right, but on the whole, publishing an e-book is trivially simple (once you’ve accomplished the non-trivial task of writing it). For the cover, you just need a jpeg of the front cover, which my artist provided.
 
For print, it is... kind of easy. I formatted my book for print through a site called Draft2Digital, where you upload your word document and select your parameters (like 6x9, margins, etc). Their program spits out a fully formatted book in pdf that Amazon accepts. Getting the map to work in print format was a lot trickier. The cover is more difficult because you need the back and spine to wrap around properly. Thankfully Alex was infinitely patient with me and promptly provided the necessary adjustments. There were some other tweaks and changes that needed to be made for the print version… which is why I’m only now posting this announcement more than a week after publication.

​Hard cover? We'll see how well the book sells before opening that can of worms. :)
 
Now begins the really hard part: marketing.

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