Serendipity

Sometimes you get lucky.

I was doing a web search this morning for an image I could use for a book video, and by divine coincidence a resource popped up that contained a wealth of information I can use for this series. Serendipity happens!!

If you’re interested in the history of Ohio Territory up to the author’s time, with primary accounts about the Native Americans and woodsmen who inhabited the area, including Simon Kenton and Tecumseh, you’re going to love Stories of Ohio by William Dean Howells, originally published in 1897 and provided as a free ebook by The Project Gutenberg.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21381/21381-h/21381-h.htm#2H_4_0007

You can download it in various ebook formats and also as a PDF here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21381

Another excellent resource on details of Native Americans and their captives I found some time ago that I may not have mentioned here before is French and Indian Cruelty Exemplified in the Life and Various Vicissitudes of Peter Williamson. I just discovered it’s available for $2 for Kindle. I have it as a text document, but it has formatting issues, so I bought the Kindle version of the original book—cheap at twice the cost!—which includes period engravings. LOVE my Kindle Fire! I can load all sorts of resources on it and carry them with me.

Point is, when you’re searching for one thing, be sure to check through your results for resources on other subjects that might be useful. You never know what might turn up!

Speaking of video trailers . . .

If you’ll remember, last year around this time I did a series on the book trailer I created for Wind of the Spirit. You can see the results at the bottom of this page. Well, I had so much fun creating it—never mind the frustrations—that I kept thinking about creating trailers for Daughter of Liberty and Native Son too. And after I posted them on Kindle, the urge became even stronger. As if I don’t have enough to do. But a lady has to have some playtime too, right?

Anyway, what really got me excited about doing a DOL video was a trailer on YouTube about the Scott Brown campaign for Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts back in January. I didn’t stumble across it until shortly after the election, but I thought it was fantastic, and I immediately decided it would make a great “template” for my own purposes.

Here’s the video, “Massachusetts Miracle.” Regardless of your political views, you have to admit that it’s tightly written and compellingly done. I especially like the music, which ties the images together very effectively.



I started working on the trailer a few weeks ago, but then got bogged down. But the “Too Late to Apologize” video stirred the muse into action again. So in my next few posts, I’m going to document the creation of the DOL video to ensure that I get it done! Unfortunately, however, NS is going to have to wait. When you’re as technically challenged as I am, putting one of these together takes a while, and if I’m ever going to get Crucible of War written, I need to limit my playing around!

Kindle Links at Last—Maybe

Well . . . Amazon finally released Daughter of Liberty and Native Son for Kindle . . . but for some reason, the price isn’t available. And they’re not showing up on a search of the Kindle store, though they do show up on a search on my name.

As I promised, here are the direct links.

Daughter of Liberty

Native Son

I’m really curious to know whether it’s possible to download these books to the Kindle even though the price doesn’t show, but obviously readers are going to want to know what they’re paying. They’re $8.99, just so you know. If you try to download either of them, I’d appreciate your feedback. In the meantime, looks like I need to get in touch with Amazon once again to see if it’s possible to get those prices up there.

Kindle Crisis

I was hoping I’d have better news by now, but we’re making progress, folks, really we are! I uploaded the Kindle version of both Daughter of Liberty and Native Son a couple of weeks ago. But because they were previously published by Zondervan, the good folks at Amazon, conscientious as the darlin’s are, dropped them into the dreaded—and apparently endless—review process.

Thanks to John McClure, our expert at Signalman Publishing who transforms our books into the Kindle format and who is the repository of all knowledge Kindlewise (thank you muchly, John!!), I obtained the highly guarded, eyes-only e-mail addy for the dtp support staff. I assured them I do indeed hold the publishing rights, and they responded with a request for Zondervan’s return of rights letter a short time ago. I immediately scanned the letter and sent it to them.

Hopefully we’re finally on track now to get those titles up and running on Kindle within the next few days. As soon as they’re available, I’ll post the direct links here.

In my next post, I promise to bring you up to date on my progress on Crucible of War. Alas, however, that’s going to have to wait until I get through the yearly tax travail. Sigh. If all goes well and I survive, I should have that mess off my desk sometime next week. Can you tell this is just my favorite time of the year?!

Going Electronic

After getting requests for the Kindle version of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son, I decided to go ahead and have books 1 and 2 converted since Wind of the Spirit is already available in that format. It’s sold a few copies, and e-books are grabbing an increasingly larger market share, so now is a good time to make the first books available too.

I finally finished the updates of both books—and rediscovered how much I love this story in the process! Releasing the electronic version will get them out there early for fans of the series who have a Kindle. If you’ve already read the books, you won’t notice much difference in the new versions. The changes are pretty subtle. Of course, the printed books will be the same larger trim size as Wind of the Spirit and will have covers that have a consistent look.

For the Kindle version, I’m going to have to use the same old Zondervan covers that I was never happy with from the start. If I had a budget and time in the schedule to produce new covers for these books, I’d do it, but the existing ones will have to do for now.

The books will be up on Kindle sometime around the middle of the month, and as soon as they’re available, I’ll make an announcement here with a link so you can go directly to them. So if you’re eager for the electronic versions, be sure to check this blog regularly.

New Editions

In case I haven’t mentioned this before, we’re planning to release new, slightly updated editions of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son at some point in the next year or two—the exact date is still on the drawing board. As soon as we find a slot for them, I’ll announce the release dates here as well as on my Publishing Dream blog.

The new editions will be done in the same size and with covers consistent with Wind of the Spirit, including a larger font to make them easier to read. Zondervan, who published the first 2 books, made the text awfully small in order to keep the page count lower, and that’s something I’ve been wanting to fix for a long time. So as I can squeeze it into my schedule, I’m digging back through the manuscripts, correcting minor details and adding a bit here and there. Most readers who’ve read the original versions won’t notice the difference, but I’m incorporating some newer research to make the text as accurate as possible.

DOL has been finalized, but I’ve only gotten to chapter 7 in NS. In the meantime, I had an illustrator recreate the maps, and I just got the final files. So naturally I want to share! Aren’t they pretty? We added a few new details to the originals. Joseph Warren’s home has been added to the Boston map, and Tess Howard’s mansion is on the Boston area map. A few other features have been added as well.

I’ve always loved maps. A detailed map is a wonderful aid to help you orient the action in a historical novel, and these ought to help bring the story to life even more vividly.

After some feedback from a reader, I’m seriously considering having both books converted to Kindle format. WOTS is already available, and on Kindle the text can be enlarged to a comfortable size. It isn’t terribly expensive to have the text converted, but it’s another item that has to be shoehorned into the budget, so it may be the first of the year before they’re available in that format.

And then the question arises, what about Barnes and Noble’s new e-reader, and Sony, and so on. So far the books we have up on Kindle haven’t sold well enough to justify the expense, but they have to be marketed just like a print version, so that’s another thing we have to think about. If you have an opinion, please post a comment and let me know what your feelings are about e-books vs print books.