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. 

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.