This has been an exciting week for me. My book “Everyday NFC: Near Field Communication Explained” has been released at Amazon in both printed and eBook versions. My excitement has run me for the whole week. I always wanted to write a book and now my dream has come true.
It was an intensive time for two months prior to the release, the time and energy spent on writing, editing and formatting was significant. Luckily, I love to write and have two editors who are close to me and patiently worked with me to hit the milestone. Formatting was my job. I wouldn’t mind to hire help but I had a deadline to meet and couldn’t afford the turn-around time. So I did. It was actually a good process to go through since the knowledge will serve me a long way; for example, I can update my eBook anytime now. I also hired a Pakistan artist from Elance to draw sketches for me. I am happy with his work. “The World is Flat” as described by Thomas L Friedman has been demonstrated by the global services provided by Elance.
Create Space and Kindle store make self-publishing quite easy and there is no set-up fee.
Three important points:
- Set up the book format based on the publishers’ instruction before you start to write. For example, the most troublesome thing for me is to format for my book. Kindle doesn’t take bullet points and I had to reformat in many places.
- Make sure your book cover and graphics are in high resolution. Some of my pictures did not pass the resolution check and it took me quite some time to seek for solutions. Finally I found a trick that used PowerPoint to re-create high resolution pictures. This article took me step by step to do the registry editing in order to make it happen. I want to thank the author and the search power of Google.
- Know when to stop writing. NFC technology development changes on a daily basis and it’s hard to say “This is it.” The good thing is Kindle allows the author to update the content at any time and the new content can be displayed within 6 hours. Revision numbering ability is provided. That makes the eBook an appealing option for me.
Do you love to write and want to publish? Then as Nike would say “Just do it”!
