Episode #71: My Muse Has Chosen For Me

As you might been able to guess, this e-book is my next project.

When I had decided to take an early retirement (pending disability) this past November, one of the modest goals I had set for myself was to get back into my writing groove in 2021. A groove, I might add, that was put on the back burner in the summer of 2019, mostly due to other pressing, and quite necessary, life commitments that required my full attention.

So here we are in 2021, and I decided that I wanted to work on an important sub-tangent to my primary goal of writing: to make money from my writing. One of the quickest, and not quite the easiest way but pretty damn close, was to enroll a book into the KDP Exclusive program.

What book, you might ask?

Well, in this particular case, I wanted to start with something simple. Which turned out to be the book pictured above. That particular book was my first official attempt at self-publishing (via Smashwords), which was accomplished in 2013.

While this book was head and shoulders above anything that I written prior, it still had a serious flaw to it: namely basic editing that was very basic. It also had a few other things that needed adjusting, so basically it became the opening salvo (hopefully) of a good quantity books enrolled in that particular program.

So far, I have tweaked all three stories in varying degrees, including changing two of the stories' titles. Among other things that need to be done in no particular order: is a table of contents, new title for the book/e-book (check), new links to where you can find me; new copyright/publishing page (check and this one was way easier to do than the one I did for What Is Life?), and most importantly, since I want to come out with a print copy, a snippet to another book that will pump up the final page count.

Presently, my manuscript page count stands at about 25 pages, with a word count that's just a shade over 11k. Once all is said and done, the present incarnation of this book will be unpublished, since one of the rules is that the book cannot be published elsewhere. Which in this case is no biggie, since a lot of people don't really do Smashwords since it requires setting up another account, and lets be honest, people (including myself) are lazy and would prefer to do one-stop shopping if at all possible.

So, if anything, this project will force me to do the following things: kill the dust bunnies on skills long dormant and face my fear of publishing on Amazon for the first time since they merged CreateSpace back in 2018.

Making money is a good thing indeed, and if I can earn enough to buy a tall dark roast from Starbucks (in my town, it's $2.36 including 6.35% sales tax), I'll be a happy boy.

{c} 2021 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved