Monday, February 21, 2011

Smashwords!

So, I'm dipping my toe in the world of e-publishing. I have two pieces up at Smashwords: "Ideas in Abundance", my chapbook of poems inspired by the Sandman story "Calliope", and my novella "Killing Time".

The formatting wasn't terribly awful: most of the poems in the collection didn't require any special treatment. I did have to re-create the tesseract poem as an image: Smashwords doesn't support tables. They also don't support columns, which means that a piece of "Killing Time" that's meant to be a newspaper article, which I had formatted in two columns, had to revert to normal formatting.

What took more time than the formatting was the cover images. Here's the one for "Ideas in Abundance":



You can see I tried to replicate the funky white-on-black word balloons Morpheus uses in the comic. It came out OK, but the text is a little small for the thumbnail that Smashwords displays. I like the cover for "Killing Time" better.



The original image (Wikimedia Commons, you can see it here) has a wicked highlight on the hour hand. I erased most of it in the course of getting rid of all the other background stuff: it looked pretty weird, so I covered it up with the flare filter.

Both pieces passed the automated format check, first try: frankly, compared to uploading school district data to the state's data submission website, this is nothing... (I shouldn't crow about that too soon: I'm waiting to see if they make it through the manual check, at which point they'll get ISBN numbers.)

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

1 comment:

Steve Perry said...

Yay! Great story.