A good self-mortifying exercise for Lent?
Look no further than your local self-publishing site.
Actually, Smashwords publishing is wonderful, explaining every step with diagrams and in ordinary terms in a Smashwords Style Guide...but I am a technological idiot. After days of fumbling, forcing myself to work as if I was technologically intelligent, I finally self-published a short, free e-book on Smashwords.
Supposedly, this process only takes a couple of hours but I inadvertently downloaded Microsoft doc.x instead of a simple doc. file. Then, I typed the meta tag for my name without capitals which prevented the entire thing from working. That little mistake took hours to uncover.
Finally, my cover was one I designed on Word and took a couple of days to decide upon which version to use but I could not convert it into a jpg image. It was difficult to find an image with enough pixels on the internet. In the end, I simply found a huge old master painting by Mary Cassatt, used Pic Monkey photo editing and slapped on a title but it looks okay. Figuring out how to get a free ISBN from the Canadian site called Ciss ( kiss) wasted more hours.
I am not sure how I feel about the result but perhaps I do not have any perspective. For my real book, I will need people to beta read, edit and give me honest suggestions.
Echoes of the Divine is free. How about checking it out and giving me some honest feedback so I can learn. I have already rewritten a better conclusion so I do not leave the reader hanging, but it will take a week to switch on the site. I think the revision is okayed when the book is reviewed by Smashwords.
And don’t forget, I will be happy to answer any questions. Trust me, no question will sound dumb to me because I have asked them all.
Important- Anyone who downloaded the first epub version of my book Echoes of the Divine saw the print overlapping. Now the print is clear and does not overlap. Simply download the newer version from Smashwords. It took me awhile to fix it
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/521798
joy of nine9 