Writings of Stuart Whitmore

You have spoken! Well, mostly you have written. My earlier blog post — How To Format a Children's Book for the Kindle — has generated more interest than any other post in this blog, or probably any of my blogs. The message is pretty clear: A step-by-step process is handy, but the process is still daunting. So, I'm going to offer to simplify it for you, down to one shortcut step. That shortcut? Let me do it for you. (Despite the focus of the earlier blog post, this is not limited to children's books.)

Sometimes "simple" ideas escape our notice. It might be from having too many distractions, it might be from not being presented with the right circumstances, or it might be due to one of countless other reasons. These are the ideas that prompt us to ask ourselves, "Why didn't I think of that before?" Often it's so simple — after finally realizing it — that we assume everyone else already knows and we're just late to the party. This blog post is about a simple idea like that.

As explained below, this blog post is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0.

When you've made it past the writing, the editing, the cover design, and all those other preparatory steps, you'll be faced with a curious question when you go to release your book for e-readers like the Kindle or NOOK. The setup steps for your new book will include a prompt for whether or not you want to apply "DRM" to your book. This is not a trivial question, even though it's just a yes/no question (unlike most other parts of the setup form). If you have never really given much thought to the DRM issue and assumed it was a simple choice, please read on.

This blog post is all about saving you time and grief, using a "cloud" service that is pretty much perfect for indie authors. In keeping with that theme, I'll save you the time (but hopefully not grief!) of reading this post if you've already discovered that service and know how to use it. So, if you're already using Dropbox and feel comfortable that you're getting the maximum value from it, you can skip the rest of this post. That was easy, wasn't it?

Whether you are already working on one or more books, or you're just getting serious about starting your first one, you must decide what "tools of the trade" you will use. This blog post offers you a virtual "toolkit" for your current and future projects. In the past you might have considered using a pen and spiral notebook, and some writers still like those tools (as do I, sometimes; the picture shown here is one of mine), but the low-tech approach has disadvantages such as not being able to make offsite backups (which leads to a risk of destruction), not checking your spelling, lacking an easy way to get a word count, etc.