Author: Cindy

I'm irritated because my posts won't publish.

Head Over Heels Live at Kobo!

HEAD OVER HEELS is now live at Kobo! The easiest way to find it is to click the link in this post (under Kobo), or, on the Kobo site, enter my name (and spell Procter with an E!). If you enter the title, well, it’s a popular title, so you’ll have to scan down the list until you find mine.

I’m currently working on the CreateSpace trade paperback edition and the Applie iBookstore edition.

Continue to visit the blog for updates.

Yoop! De! And a—

Whoop!

Clicking the link here under Cindy Procter-King will take you to my page at Kobo.

Updated HEAD OVER HEELS on Kindle and Smashwords!

The other day, I wrote such a lovely post about my excitement at HEAD OVER HEELS finally being available on Kindle and Smashwords. Even though I saved the draft multiple times, immediately upon hitting Publish to release it onto my blog, the post disappeared. All but the first few sentences. So here I am, trying to duplicate my enthusiasm. Here are the first two original paragraphs:

After several days of a steeeeeeeeeeep learning curve and many frustrating moments, I am absolutely thrilled to report that the Updated & Revised third edition of HEAD OVER HEELS, self-published under the imprint, Blue Orchard Books, is NOW AVAILABLE on Kindle and Smashwords!

Sorry for shouting, but when I began my self-publishing journey, I never imagined I would rewrite 80% of the sentences in my first published book. I thought I’d just upd—

That’s where the blog post disappeared.

So, here I try to continue:

Sorry for shouting, but when I began my self-publishing journey, I never imagined I would rewrite 80% of the sentences in my first published book. I thought I’d just update the technology (cell phones, Internet, etc.) and be done with it, but it turned out I couldn’t keep my sticky fingers off my computer keyboard. It just didn’t feel right updating the technology without also revising to reflect changes in my writing style over the years, changes in cultural references since the 1st and 2nd editions of the book, etc. The great news is that I’m more in love with the story and characters than ever. And I hope you will be, too.

I want to thank the talented Kim Killion of Hot Damn Designs for the wonderful cover and also her assistant, Jennifer L., for being so easy to work with. Michael Hale of Hale Author Services did the proofreading and formatting, and I really enjoyed working with him, too. I look forward to working with both of them again.

Now that I’ve conquered Kindle and Smashwords (which will distribute to Nook, Sony and other venues for me), it’s time to move on to Kobo and Apple. I’m also doing a new trade paperback edition via CreateSpace. Right now, the print cover design is underway.

A note to Nook users. Canadian Indie authors can not, at this time, upload directly to the Barnes & Noble self-publishing portal called PubIt. So a Nook edition won’t be available until the Smashwords distribution is accomplished. I have no idea how long that will take, but have no fear, I will announce the Nook release here. In the meantime, if you own a Nook and you absolutely can not wait to buy a copy from Barnes & Noble, the Nook ebook format, ePub, can be purchased from Smashwords. You just download the ePub format onto your hard drive after purchase and then transfer it to your Nook (a process called side-loading). Because I don’t own a Nook, I’m not exactly sure how to accomplish this, but a quick Google search should help you out.

Here’s the new cover and the updated back cover copy. Thanks for helping me celebrate! And if you’ve read the book before and would like to read it again, thanks to taking the middle man out of the publishing equation via KDP and Smashwords, the ebook is now more reasonably priced than ever before. At $2.99, it’s no more than buying a tall latte. Cheaper, in fact. So grab yourself a latte, grab your Kindle, and enjoy!

Magee Sinclair has had it up to her sassy short hairdo with the recent blunders pushing her family’s advertising agency to the brink. How can she accept the promotion her father plans when she keeps making costly mistakes? She needs to bring in more business however she can. So when new client Justin Kane asks her to role-play as his girlfriend for a weekend in exchange for a lucrative campaign, she jumps at the chance.

Justin’s goal to expand his chain of bike stores hinges on a distribution deal with a manufacturer. First, he needs to impress the man at a mountain resort while they bike trails with their significant others. But Justin’s girlfriend dumps him, forcing him to find a quick replacement. Magee—pretty, clever, and a skilled cyclist—is the perfect choice to masquerade as his “lover.”   Or so Justin thinks.

Because Magee is in major trouble. She knows no more about mountain biking than Justin does about demi-bras. Before long, an irate ex pops up, fake identities abound, and a whole lot of doors slam in the middle of the night. Yet, through the chaos, Magee and Justin discover what it really means to fall head over heels….

Eight Month Eye Report

I skipped out on my six-month follow-up report for the laser eye surgery I had last December. If you want to read the whine-fest for my recovery at the three-month point, click here.

The reason I didn’t post at the six-month point is because SNAFU and FUBAR were having their wicked way with me. Not only had my eyes not improved any at the six-month point, but my prescription had gotten a little worse. I’m only talking about the right eye, which was set for distance. My left eye, which was set for reading, is amazing. No problems at all.

So, at six months I learned that my vision was still on the down slide and that my astigmatism, which the surgery was supposed to address, had not gone away. My eye guy dutifully faxed his findings to the laser eye surgery clinic in another town, and I knew from talking to the clinic at the three-month point that I was to wait a few days, maybe a week if the surgeon was on holidays, to hear back.

So I waited. And I waited. And then I waited some more.

After three weeks, I thought surely he must have returned from holiday by now–that is, if he’d left in the first place. So I called. Nope, they hadn’t received a fax from my optometrist on June 16th. Phone call to Eye Guy. Yes, they’d sent it off and had the time stamp to prove it. Of course, it was close to the end of a work day.

Phone call back to the laser eye clinic. Oops. Guess they did send it to us. Wonder what happened to it? Can they please send it again?

I guess a mouse ate the faxed report. Whatever. On around July 7th it was sent again, and by the time I heard from the laser eye clinic that they wanted to see me do some scans, I was just about to leave for the RWA National Conference in Anaheim. So we scheduled my exam for August 15th, this week. Eight months practically exactly since I had the surgery.

The result? Good news! Well, the bad news first is that my eye is even worse than it was at six months. But the culprit isn’t just the distance. It’s my astigmatism. The distance and the astigmatism combined have been FUBARing all over the place. However, I don’t have severe dry eye. I just feel like I need drops all the time because my poor right eye is trying to focus on SOMETHING and is having a devil of a time.

The upshot of all this is that there IS, thank God, enough prescription, as they call it, that I qualify for an “enhancement.” Another word for this is a “touch-up.” WHEN to have the touch-up is the question. I don’t want to have the touch-up until we’re reasonably assured that my right eye vision is stable in its crapability. So I’m going back in six weeks, and we’ll see how crappy my vision is then.

In the meantime, I am “legal” for driving. But I only feel safe driving in bright sunlight. No twilight or night time or rainy driving for me. Snow would totally freak me out.

I will most likely, after the enhancement, still feel the need for driving glasses for certain situations (like long drives at night), but as long as I don’t feel the need for glasses every time I leave the house (or even watching TV lately), I’ll be happy. After all, life consists of more than staring at a computer screen, although both eyes can perform that feat remarkably well.

Cross your fingers that I get a green light in 6 weeks and that the resulting enhancement is a success. I’m not pleased to have to re-experience the recovery period but if I get a decent right eye out of the deal, I will be SUPER HAPPY. You can bet on it.

Doing My First Indie Uploads This Week!

I now have in my grabby little hands (or on my grabby little hard drive) the Indie author files for uploading HEAD OVER HEELS to Kindle, Kobo, Apple and Smashwords. As far as I’m aware, Kindle, Kobo and Apple are the only formats I can upload (as a Canadian) without going through an aggregator like Smashwords (which distributes to Nook, Sony and a lot of other places).

I have never done this before, and of course I didn’t open any accounts, etc., before arriving at this point. That would take all the fun out of panicking. I have no clue if there’s a “best practices” order in which to upload. And I do need to find out if Canadians can upload anywhere other than the venues I’ve listed here. So, I have some research to do.

It’s a busy weekend filled with personal commitments. Today I am, unfortunately, attending a celebration of life for a friend who passed away a week ago. Beginning Monday, I will start my foray into Sindie publishing! Will let you know how it goes and when the book is available on which venues. Which means soon I’ll be updating the HEAD OVER HEELS page to reflect the new excerpt and all the buy links.

If you would like notification of a particular format (Kindle, Nook, Kobo), please drop me an email and I’ll let you know as soon as the book is available in that format. I will be sending out a newsletter once the first format is available, but don’t want to pepper newsletter subscribers with too many editions within a short time.

Thanks!

Head Over Heels Sindie Pub Update

Honestly, I really am going to write another Galapagos travel blog post—maybe even this week! Just not now (check the Archives by clicking the Galapagos link if you’re interested in what I’ve written about my travels so far). Today I’m popping in from a busy and hot (finally!) summer to report that I’ve finished going over the proofreader’s file for the Indie edition of HEAD OVER HEELS and have handed the book over to my formatter for conversion into Smashwords, Kindle and ePub (Kobo, Apple and other outlets) files. I’m also hiring out for the interior design of the new trade paperback edition I’ll be doing through CreateSpace. The same talented cover designer, Kim Killion of Hot Damn Designs, who did the ebook cover, will design the paperback cover. By the end of August, my “soft launch” should be complete. I hope!

What is a “soft launch,” you ask? It would be nice if I had a definitive answer, but that would require more research than I have time for at the moment. Instead, I’ll go with a Sindie answer (ie. what I’ve figured out but haven’t verified yet). A “soft launch” is when a self-published author is busy uploading her book to the various venues which she, as a Canadian, can upload to on her own. Example, Kindle and Kobo. Nook must be uploaded (for Canadians) through a service such as the one an aggregator like Smashwords provides. There’s a time lag between when an author uploads a book and when it’s actually made available for sale. So, in effect, there can be several “launches” for the same Indie-published book. There could be a Kindle launch, a Nook launch, a Kobo launch, a CreateSpace (trade paperback) launch. They might occur days or weeks apart. From what I have been able to gather, some Indie authors quietly go about the “soft” launch and then, when the book is available everywhere, they do a “hard launch.” In other words, announce the book as available everywhere. Other authors announce the availability as the various formats go live.

I will most likely follow the latter option. I’m too excited to wait for a hard launch (if I even have the terminology correct. If you are an Indie author and I don’t have the terminology correct, feel free to, well, correct me). The easiest way to keep up with when a particular format is available is to:

– subscribe to the RSS feed to this blog (link at bottom of blog – click where it says Entries and then click the Subscribe link that will appear in the feed).
– Join my Facebook author page and then make sure you comment or like a post every so often so Facebook will continue feeding you my updates
– Join my newsletter on Yahoogroups (see box in upper right hand corner of blog for ease of joining) and, when I am ready, I will send out a newsletter announcing where the book is available. I will likely save the newsletter for a “hard launch,” with perhaps the exception of the trade paperback version, because it might take longer than the ebook launches.

And there you have it. Several ways you can be Cindy-fied. This is not to be confused with being dignified. Dignity is for sissies.

Back from RWA in Anaheim

I recently returned from the RWA National Conference in Anaheim, California, and I had a great time. This was a very positive conference experience for me. I had the chance to participate in two author signings, the first as Cindy Procter-King for the Literacy Autographing that was held on July 25th and then a few days later, I participated in the Samhain publisher book give-away and signing as an author (under my alter ego). I also attended some great, informative workshops and networked with some people I haven’t seen in years. Now I’m home and ready to get back to work on the re-issues of Head Over Heels and Borrowing Alex. The proofing files for Head Over Heels are in my in-box. As soon as I fulfill the agent and editor requests (for a different book) obtained during the conference, I will get right to the proofing so then I can deliver the file to my formatter. Yes, Head Over Heels WILL be on sale again in August!

In the meantime, here are some photos from the conference. Enjoy!

Laguna Beach, where I stayed with my conference roommate the night before I moved to the hotel. Beautiful!

 

My future daughter-in-law (FDIL) is a huge Nora Roberts fan, so before the Literacy Autographing (in which I was participating) got under way, I bought a signed copy of THE WITNESS signed to my FDIL from Nora and then Nora’s assistant suggested we take this picture. Thanks, Nora, for being a great sport.
Moi signing copies of WHERE SHE BELONGS, currently available in library-edition hardcover and also audio book.
With roommate, good friend, and author Jamie Sobrato, at the Literacy Autographing.