It’s been almost three weeks since my first and last blog post but I’ll put it down to seasonable exuberance and excitement, particularly as my first book, What a Piece of Work is Man, is finally up on Amazon; and just in time for Christmas! Between all the chocolates and spare socks that I normally get from Santa, I have to say that this was probably one of the best Christmas presents ever!

I suppose this finally makes me a bona fide published author, although I very much appreciate that having a book on Amazon is a far cry from actually SELLING a book on Amazon. But it’s a start and a very close and kind-hearted school friend from yesteryear actually went ahead and bought a copy, so my royalty page is no longer showing a duck! So, really, thanks for that (you know who you are!).

I’m NOT expecting you all to rush off and buy a copy (although I wont be stopping you, either!), but I suppose I should at least let you have the link, just in case you want to take a look at what managed to cause all my Christmas cheer and excitement.

Amazon.com: What a Piece of Work is Man eBook: Peter Morgan: Kindle Store

The best thing about seeing your first book up there on Amazon is the impetus and motivation it gives you to keep at it. Most people are said to have at least one book in them and I suspect that many people actually have more than one. Once you see how straight forward it is to get your work out there, then it’s really just a question of knuckling down and going for it!

Which is why, before the ink was even dry on my first Createspace book, I got cracking on another book I had been putting together but never got around to finishing. In the spirit of Blue Peter, it’s always easier when you have one you “prepared earlier” so I brushed off the cobwebs and started to tidy it up ready for Amazon.

It’s a good thing I was still on a high from my first book, though, as getting the formatting write (pun intended) drove me insane. What makes it worse is that once you upload your book to Createspace, if you do need to make any changes, you have to do it in the original document, not in the uploaded version, so you have to do the whole upload thing again. Why this drove me nuts is that the formatting seemed to be different every time (ie lost page numbers, skewhiff headers, etc) and I couldn’t work out why.

In the end, I had a cunning plan and stopped uploading Word documents and started uploading PDFs instead, which certainly seemed to help. Still, it’s taken quite a few attempts to get the formatting exactly how I wanted it but, hopefully, I’m now ready to go.

Again, just like my earlier poetry book, this isn’t going to be a best seller any time soon as it’s a rather specialized non-fiction topic on the subject of hostage negotiations but I’m hoping my close and kind-hearted school friend from yesteryear (sic.) will want to update her Pete Morgan Books collection!

No? Oh well.

Anyway, that’s it for this post. I’ll keep you posted on my progress when the muse next comes upon me you.