Hello,

If you check out my blog today I have changed its color, added a note or two and brightened it up a bit with new color, it’s the least I can do and I literally mean it, it’s the least amount of computer work I can do, I have no outstanding computer skills or talents. I look at my friend GiGi’s blog with its pictures and links and know it would take me forever to figure out how to add those touches to my own blog and these aren’t big additions. Those are small examples of my lack of skill, a larger one--that has caused me restless nights of late--was trying to format You Don’t Know Me to submit to Lulu for publishing. Though I read the instructions carefully regarding what I needed to do, I could not manage to format my novel in the exact way needed for it to be uploaded to Lulu; I had to contract the formatting out and at a pretty penny, thinking all along, if I had better skills I could have done it myself. I also wasn’t sure about my ability to successfully complete the uploading of the book to Lulu and not wanting to make a mistake that would set the novel’s debut back further, I contracted this out too.

It’s funny how, as writers, we want to control every aspect of the writing experience and most writers might, I just can’t, specifically regarding the self-publishing route where all the best companies are of course technologically based where the process has been streamlined to hitting a few computer keys though the key is knowing which are the right keys, I just don’t know it and have to seek help.

To be honest, the process is not all that cut and dried like I thought it would be, there are a number of elements that must be in place, must be just right if you want to be successful at submitting a novel to the best self-publishing companies and the least of it is if you have a good story. You want your book cover to be great to capture attention but it has to be formatted correctly (again) or you’ll have trouble submitting it, you need to make sure the novel has the right elements and not story elements but to be written in an acceptable font, some of the pages have to be in a certain order and those pages have requirements such as making sure you have proper gutters—it took me a minute with this one.

It was a lot to take in for me, again maybe not for most writers who are better at computer tasks than I am, for me though I tried, but was not successful at the tasks. I felt badly for about a minute at not being more computer gifted until I realized it didn’t matter because I’ll have the same thing a writer with more computer skills will have: a complete, touchable novel anyone can read and enjoy; this can’t be beat.


Keep writing.

If you have any comments or suggestions I have a new e-mail address at: mathewsla@hotmail.com

Until next time, God willing,