BookExpo America 2016

I remembered to start the Map My Walk app on my iPhone and by the end of the day, I had hoofed over 15 miles at McCormick cruising the aisles of booths:

It brought back memories of the many trade shows past I have worked & walked and made clear that publishing is, indeed, an industry like all others. The publisher booths were impressive and put into stark relief their David & Goliath relationship with self-publishing authors.

I met Mark Coker at Smashwords, connected with a live person at IngramSpark and got a chance to get face-to-face with groups and companies that service “Independent Publishers.”

The frosting on the cake was meeting Berkeley Breathed:

 

 

Night of the Living Dead (Author)

I guess dead men do tell tales: An email from iBooks this weekend announced that the latest book from #1 New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn (R.I.P. 2013) will be released October 6, 2015. Here’s the cover:

Is traditional publishing really dying…or just busy turning bookstores into masoleums?

Scribus — Interior Formatting & Cover for My Brother’s Keeper

IngramSpark Print on Demand – 5.25 x 8 Trade Paperback

Interior Formatting Specs:  MBK141029 – Scribus Interior Format 

Cover Artwork on Lightning Source Template:

Scrivener

I learned about the software called Scrivener through Joanna Penn (www.jfpenn.com & www.TheCreativePenn.com).  Many, many thanks.

It is like a complete author’s studio, bringing together many functions and activities in one user interface.  It’s only been about a month, but it has made the process of writing so much easier and much more productive.

So far my favorite features are:

1. Everything from the manuscript to research  & notes in one place, appropriately called a Project “Binder,” including text, images, pdfs
2. Corkboard with Index cards to help visualize and organize plotting, characters & locations
3. Ability to save web pages as pdf files directly into the Research part of the project binder simply by pasting the URL
4. Project Target window to track and display both total manuscript word count & session word count in real time
5. Ability to output manuscript directly to epub file format to read on my iPad

Before I started, I did the 2-hour tutorial and it was invaluable to getting started.  Importing my existing projects was pretty straightforward and easy.

It is  definitely one of those “how did I get along without it” products.