How to Release a Book on Amazon
There’s a certain amount of preparation required, so bear with us while we go through some of it.
Continue reading How to Release a Book on Amazon, presentation by Sheila Deeth, Nov 15th 2020Category Archives: Journal
Challenges Anthology Title
We have a fantastic cover image, and we want a fantastic cover to go with it. To which end, we need to be able to create the cover well before November’s meeting, so… we need a title.
The numbers in brackets indicate the number of people who have voted for each particular title. But what we’re voting on now is “sets of titles.” and the numbers in each header indicate how many votes each “set” has received – not the same as how many votes titles within the set have received. Once we’ve chosen a winning set (or a couple of sets), Sheila will research variations on the titles, starting with the one that received most votes in the set, to see which titles work – e.g. which titles might be found by people looking for literary anthologies, which are only going to be seen by people seeking self-help books, and which point are found by people planning camping trips, etc. So… please look at the sets of titles below, and email admin with your favorites.
Also, please note, I’ve added a new “set” as more suggestions have come in. If you want to change your vote, just let me know!
Suggested title-sets so far (with numbers of votes so far):
- Challenge 8
- Challenging Times (1)
- Change and Challenge (2)
- Writing through Challenging Times (1)
- Challenging Moments, Threads of Hope (4)
- Challenges Outside the Gate (1)
- Apart and Together 10
- Coming Together, Falling apart (2)
- Coming Together in a Time of Falling Apart (4)
- Falling Apart – Coming Together (3)
- Falling Apart Together (2)
- Coming Together While Falling Apart (1)
- Journeys and Ways 6
- Finding Our Way Through Chaos (1)
- Making Our Way Through Chaos (1)
- Finding Our Way (3)
- Journey Through Chaos (7)
- Journeys Through Chaos (3)
- Our Heroes’ Journeys (1)
- Journey into the Sun (2)
- Journeys Beyond Chaos (2)
- Tribulations 1
- Word Tribulations (1)
- Trials and Tribu-Words (1)
- Tribulations and Unity (1)
- Waiting 5
- Waiting for the Smoke to Clear (4)
- Waiting for Locusts (4)
- Waiting While the World Falls Apart (1)
- Waiting for Tomorrow (1)
- Waiting for 2021 (1)
- Waiting for the Vaccine (1)
- Quirky 8
- Weaving with Stones (2)
- Everything but the Locusts (3)
- We’re Zoomed! We’re All Zoomed! (4)
- Doom, Gloom and Zoom (1)
- The Moon is a Friend (1)
- Gravitating to Wholeness (2)
Comments made on these titles:
- Might be nice to end the title on a positive note
- Journeys plural represents all our journeys
- Journey echoes the writing idea of the hero’s journey, and we’re all heroes
- Waiting for Tomorrow fits with Beyond Yesterday from last year
Please add your comments and suggestions in the comments!
Challenges Anthology Update
New deadlines:
End of third Sunday in September (midnight tonight!):
- All submissions must be received at anthology @ portlandwritersmill.org
- If you want space for an image in your entry, a placeholder image (even if it’s not the final image) together with the name of the submission it goes with, must be received by anthology @ portlandwritersmill.org
- Sheila will upload a “first draft” to the website for authors and members to read at the beginning of the following week (watch this space!)
By the end of the first Sunday in October (next contest deadline)
- Title will have been chosen (watch this space!)
- Final images will have been received – send them to anthology @ porlandwritersmill.org
- First draft edits will be complete.
- Judy, Catherin, Jean and Sheila would love to welcome additional editors. Email admin @ portlandwritersmill.org to volunteer.
- Sheila will incorporate editors’ changes and upload the “author draft” to the website for authors and members at the beginning of the following week.
By the end of the third Sunday in October (next meeting day)
- Authors will have proofread their own and adjacent entries and sent all edits to Sheila
- Authors will have sent any requests to Sheila for small changes to their entries (small changes only!)
- Final images will have been received and included
- Sheila will incorporate all these changes and upload the “final draft” to the website at the beginning of the following week.
By the end of the first Sunday in November (next contest deadline)
- Members will have reported any typos in the final draft and Sheila will have fixed them
- Sheila will have calculated the final “author plus postage” price per copy
- Members will have decided how many print copies they will want and will start sending checks in payment.
- Email admin @ portlandwritersmill.org to find out where to send such checks and how to make them out
At November’s meeting
- Sheila will demo how to upload a book to Amazon, for kindle and print copies.
- Sheila will demo Amazon’s cover creator and also how to upload a real cover, created elsewhere.
- Sheila will make the order for copies as soon as Amazon approves the uploads.
At December’s meeting
- With any luck, everyone will have been able to pick up their entries
- We’ll celebrate a job well done and tell all our friends to buy our book!
CHALLENGES – 2020 Anthology
Topic
Challenges
Open to
Member of the Writers’ Mill
Deadline
End of the first Sunday of September
What we’re looking for
Please collect your challenges stories, from Writers’ Mill contests, from your computer, from your dreams and nightmares, or from anywhere else you can find them. Send entries to anthology at portlandwritersmill dot org.
Submission requirements
- No more than 5 separate entries per person (not counting pictures)
- No more than 5,000 words in total – for example, you might send one 5,000 word novella, or five 1,000 word essays…
- Pictures will be included as appropriate. Feel free to send pictures with your entries, or separately from your entries, but remember all images must be royalty-free for us to use them in a published work.
Anthology 2020 – CHALLENGES
LATEST NEWS
We voted at our Fathers’ Day meeting, and the theme for the 2020 anthology is CHALLENGES. So please look through the challenges represented by your contest entries, respond to the challenges of our Covid lives, consider other challenges accepted or denied, by your characters, real or imaginary (or even poetic), and send your entries to the anthology email address. If you don’t know what that is, look in the newsletter. Thanks!
Below are (abbreviations of) contest titles from recent (and upcoming) months. The aim is to find a topic that will cover as many as possible of your entries. This will be the topic for the anthology.
- Disguised truths
- Dwindling days
- Family traditions
- Morning afters
- Bridge
- Storm
- Chasing rain
- Peeking at the future
- Seasons
- Coming Together
- Mountains and Valleys, and
- Strange Times
Below are the topic titles suggested so far. If your suggestion is not included, it doesn’t mean I’m ignoring you. It means I’m collecting suggested “titles” together into “topics.” When we get to titles, they’ll still be in my list.
- Strange (strange times, strange connections etc.)
- Separation (what divides/unites us, separates/connects us etc.)
- Challenges (Covid, quarantine, end of the world, time, place, people etc.)
- Unity (in the face of… maybe fits under challenges)
- Zoom (fast, slow, the program, etc)
- Heroes (and villains, and everything in between…)
Please be ready to vote on Father’s Day, or email your preference to admin.
Beyond Yesterday: The Writers’ Mill Journal Volume 7
PICK UP YOUR COPIES ON SUNDAY!
Or buy them again…
On Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Yesterday-Writers-Mill-Journal-ebook/dp/B081MTKD87/
in Print: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1709195789/
and on our Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/The-Writers-Mill/e/B081P17P5Q
I shall continue adding our books to our author page as soon as I can. And I’ve made the order for the anthology. Let’s all look forward to an official release-party plus review of the year in December!
We made a book, and you can too!
Our “Let’s make another book” presentation covered and/or touched the following book-creation topics, with notes and additional information below:
- How to Title your book
- How to Format your book
- How to Edit your book
- How to Prepare your book for Printing
- How to Prepare your book for Kindle
- How to Upload your ebook
- How to use Amazon’s Cover Creator
- How to Upload your print book (and use Cover Creator again!)
- How to get your book onto your Author Page (yes, I know, I didn’t have time to cover this, but some of you asked…)
Writers’ Mill Minutes 10191117
November’s meeting brought 13 of us to watch and assist in the uploading of The Writers’ Mill Journal Volume 7 to Amazon. Those of you who missed it missed some fantastic healthy snacks from Ria and an ongoing scene of great stress, excitement and triumph. The minutes below are LONG because I’ve tried to cover everything we did and all the questions I was asked about what we might not have done. So here goes… Continue reading Writers’ Mill Minutes 10191117