Sometime in July, I hope to join the ranks of self-published authors by publishing my debut novel "Winter Fall" on Amazon KDP, and perhaps on other platforms a few months after that. My work is currently in the editing / polishing stage, which I *hope* to have completed in a month or so (since I'm working full-time on this) and then I'll take the plunge...yikes!
I've already created a cover for my novel, so my first question is thus: where am I able to post it on this forum? I noticed that I can't post images in my sig line, is that something that requires 50 posts to get permission to do this? I'm pretty happy with it myself, I'd just like to see what you guys think of it.
Secondly, I'd like to ask about formatting for the kindle - does it matter what kind of word processing software I use for this? I use Open Office, which isn't quite as robust as Word, so I hope this won't be a problem. I suppose it'll be somewhat of a trial-and-error process - I assume there is a way to "test" upload to kindle to see how it looks before going live with it. Another question I need to have answered is how to do a proper "dash" instead of a hypen--does it involve typing two hyphens together (like I just did?) Or is this something that can only be done in Word? Right now, my ms just has a single hyphen mark instead of proper dashes - I'd really like to fix this before I upload, if possible.
As for the subject matter for my novel, it's a disaster / post-apocalypic story about a family's struggle to survive in the aftermath of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, followed by nuclear war (grim, I know...lol). It's also intended to be a stand-alone novel, as I want to hold off doing a series after my second novel, which I plan to start writing as soon as this one goes live. I just figured it'd be best to have a stand-alone as a my debut until I get some more writing experience under my belt.
Will leave it at this for now, thanks in advance for any suggestions and ideas about how to proceed.
I've already created a cover for my novel, so my first question is thus: where am I able to post it on this forum? I noticed that I can't post images in my sig line, is that something that requires 50 posts to get permission to do this? I'm pretty happy with it myself, I'd just like to see what you guys think of it.
Secondly, I'd like to ask about formatting for the kindle - does it matter what kind of word processing software I use for this? I use Open Office, which isn't quite as robust as Word, so I hope this won't be a problem. I suppose it'll be somewhat of a trial-and-error process - I assume there is a way to "test" upload to kindle to see how it looks before going live with it. Another question I need to have answered is how to do a proper "dash" instead of a hypen--does it involve typing two hyphens together (like I just did?) Or is this something that can only be done in Word? Right now, my ms just has a single hyphen mark instead of proper dashes - I'd really like to fix this before I upload, if possible.
As for the subject matter for my novel, it's a disaster / post-apocalypic story about a family's struggle to survive in the aftermath of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, followed by nuclear war (grim, I know...lol). It's also intended to be a stand-alone novel, as I want to hold off doing a series after my second novel, which I plan to start writing as soon as this one goes live. I just figured it'd be best to have a stand-alone as a my debut until I get some more writing experience under my belt.
Will leave it at this for now, thanks in advance for any suggestions and ideas about how to proceed.
