Short Stuff
Posted Wed, 05/18/11
For the last few weeks I've busy as a proverbial bee, re-formatting files and designing new covers for books in the Short Tales Collection. It was one of the few times I was thankful all eleven titles are relatively short, so to speak, or I would still be in the trenches.
Giving Celtic Remnants over to the Kindle and Nook-Book phenomenon, I decided it was time to do the same thing for the Short Tales Collection. I worked on the eleven books in batches, first with new cover designs and then with various types of formatting acceptable at Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (Nook-Book).
All I can say is, thank God for the free conversion program called Calibre. It allowed me to convert one file into different formats at the same time, also adding covers, blurbs, keywords, tags, series hierarchy and ratings.
However, I found it difficult and extremely emotional to go through The Journey to Rainbow Bridge again. It's basically a diary of the time period when Foofer was diagnosed with Hemangiosarcoma, to seven months after his death. It was obviously more enjoyable to re-read and format the other ten titles, which for the most part are light-hearted and filled with fantasy, humor, magic and adventure.
Titles in the Short Tales Collection:
Here's a screenshot of the Juvenile Fiction page on my web site:
I'm amazed by the sales progression of the various books within a short period of time. For example, copies of Foofer Gets Groomed began selling barely an hour after the book went live at Barnes & Noble.
Thereafter, typically in the order in which I uploaded content to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, titles began selling in multiple batches, or one at a time. Celtic Remnants is also keeping pace with the short stories.
Sales for the Food Fare Cookbook are brisk as well. I edited, formatted and designed the cookbook, which is featured at the Food Fare web site. Nook-Book copies are outselling the Kindle edition as of this writing. I'm rather surprised because Kindle seems to be a more popular device than the Nook-Book reader these days. I've had discussions with my publisher about putting together a second cookbook, probably to be released later this year.
I'm now awaiting the release of Quixotic Crossings - any day now. Being the second book in the eight-part Collective Obsessions Saga, there are still six more titles to follow.
It's turned out to be a very busy year indeed.
Tags: Foofer; Short Tales Collection; Writing