Off to the post office today to put ten free copies of Dolphin Singers into the mail for the winners of the Goodreads giveaway. A big thank you for all those who signed up to received one - and especially those who didn't win! (Another giveaway coming soon if you want to try again).  For those who did, I hope very much you enjoy the book look forward to seeing your comments and evaluations show up on Goodreads and Amazon. (If anyone feels really inspired, it would  be good to see at least a comment or to on the Barnes and Noble site. It tends to be neglected.)

 It is great fun for an author to learn that others are reading and enjoying something  you worked on so long and so hard. I was especially pleased a while ago to learn from a friend that she has been reading Dolphin Singers to her special needs class in a Watsonville elementary school. Even the scowling boy in the corner eventually came around, she said, and started listening. My inner  glow for the day.

 Dolphin Singers has been launched! Now available on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble as well as Create Space, its home site, with, I am sure many more online book venues to come. (I notice two purchases already in Europe paid for with Euros!) I want to give a special shout out to the marvelous features of the Create Space publishing platform. Having used, satisfactorily, both Booklocker and Lulu for past efforts, I was very impressed with the intuitive layout of the author's dashboard and the do it yourself tools available for creation of both book interior and cover. I have, perhaps, more skills with Photoshop than the average author but had been confounded in those previous projects on other sites when I got to the front and back covers. There are gutter sizes and book spines to get precisely right and I always ended up paying one of their resident experts to get me over those obstacles. At Create Space it came together all without help. They allowed me to reload the entire manuscript as many times as I wanted to get final tweaks and corrections made.  For the entire process, uploading an acceptable interior, creating the cover, obtaining and adding an isbn number and a scanning label on the back, access to markets both national and international, and finally, publication on Kindle, all of that my friends was FREE. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop as I worked my way through their clearly organized series of steps. There was none. They also allow me to purchase preview copies for as low as $2.18 and even have a preview app with a link that allows easy solicitation of those first essential comments on your work. You just create the preview content with questions to answer and then send friends the link. Amazon also works closely with Goodreads now, a vast site for readers with myriad ways, not only to find a great next book to read, but to recommend books to others, and, as an author, to add yourself to reading lists and come to the attention of targeted book lovers with low cost ads and free giveaways. All in all I would say the gates to personal creativity are completely open now. The old gatekeepers have been outflanked. It is just up to authors now to make sure that we keep the standards of quality they used to (more or less) ensure. The level of self promotion required is pretty much the same for both Print on Demand publications and Agent/Publishing house publications. It's an exciting new world of creative possibilities. 

Motion Detectable

The business of publishing your own work through Print on Demand is a slow process for most of us. As well as writing something worthwhile, and then editing it til your eyes cross, there is the business of getting people of consequence, or maybe even just the teenager next door, to read it and make enthusiastic comments you can add to the back cover or to promotional material. I have reached that stage at least, at last, with both Dolphin Singers and Greenstone's Promise. Looking for first take readers who will point the way to the (thousands??) to follow. Easier said than done. So few people, alas, make time for reading anymore, and many young people in particular with the endless buffet of distraction available to them, seem to have placed novel reading very low on their list of attractive choices.  I asked a friend with teens if they might like to sample the wares and she responded with enthusiasm. Something they could all do at the family vacation cottage.  I signed with relief and sent the links to both draft volumes where they currently reside in the cloud and waited. And waited. At last, when hope had gone, and it was clear that other activities had claimed all the time at the cabin, I got an enthusiastic response.  it was not the teens who responded. It was her mother, a teacher of many years experience, who actually called me up to leave a long message saying how much she  loved it.When I called back, she agreeably sent a blurb to be added to the back and now I await, in fact, the feedback of the teen next door. A young reader who I know will actually finish the book, for she is one who has learned the delight of reading and all the places it can take you that even motion pictures and certainly 140 character tweets cannot.  If any of you, dear readers, would like to take this on and send add your pre-publication feedback, please contact me at cesca.hampton@gmail.com. I'll send you the links as well.  

Dolphin Singers and Greenstone's Promise almost ready for publication - stay tuned!

Several  years ago now, I asked myself what would be a fun first novel  for me to write, and a fun read for others. The answer was Voyage of the Makai an adventure story of five youngsters who cross the wide Pacific from the coast of California to Hawaii to right the wrongs that have been done them. First published under the title Children's Voyage, the Long Journey Home through Lulu.com, it was my first foray into Print on Demand publishing and a way to learn how to write a full length novel, albeit for youngsters.  The result received truly enthusiastic response from friends who read it and from Goodreads giveaway readers and from a very few genuine purchasers. To my virgin author's ears, these seemed like rave reviews, but I have learned that such responses don't count for much in the world of publishing, not if that is where you leave things.
     This blog itself if my attempt to go further in learning the POD process of online promotion. There are  wonderful new tools available to authors at Amazon and Goodreads and many other sites but much effort will be required. The fact is, much effort would be required going mainstream as well.  No longer are writers captive to a publishing industry that increasingly limits what is published to what will make big money for them - while asking more and more of authors in the promotion of their own work - as much as if we had printed it POD - and with less return.
     Not wanting to include vampires in my novel, explore a dystopia, or reinvent Harry Potter on another continent, and not already having a "platform" of 20,000 followers, (the latest requirement to achieve the holy grail of finding an agent I am told) I decided to go ahead on my own and publish via the Print on Demand Process. I promise to add more about this experience in later blogs but for now I want to proudly announce that the second novel of the Voyages of the Makai series, Greenstone's Promise,  is now complete and will soon be available. A few weeks before this, the first book of the two part series will be reissued. It has been slightly revised and retitled "Dolphin Singers" and this time the two together will receive a coherent promotion campaign.
     What will the campaign consist of? That also will be revealed in future blogs on this site. I know there is an eager and expanding  community of authors eager to explore the benefits of POD publishing and  learn more about online promotion.  For now, I will limit myself to recommending Booklocker.com as a site to explore for those wishing to try this short cut to the publishing process. They did a good job with a previous project, Buddha on a Midnight Sea, and I plan to have them take on this new one. I have also followed the first and biggest suggestion in a wonderful book on this topic entitled Plug your Book  Online Book Marketing for Authors by Steve Webber: I have started this blog and connected it to Amazon's Author Central site. So stay tuned! Let's see how it works this time.

Buddha on a Midnight Sea - Short Stories

Here is the link to my book of Buddhist Short Stories, Buddha on a Midnight Sea, first described in an older author's blog.