At long last, my collection of short stories, We’re Here to Help… Ourselves, is available in paperback and preorders for the ebook version, which will release December 2! (I managed to fix most (but not all) of the formatting issues.)

Publishing this collection was my most significant writing goal this year, and I’m pleased to have checked it off.  It took almost the entire year.  First, I had to compile the entire manuscript.  The collection has 14 short stories, but originally it had 16.  After presenting my first several possible title choices to the Norther Virginia Writers Club, one astute member (Darius Jones) suggested cutting the only two horror stories in the collection. (Everything else is sci fi.) That finalized the collection, but I still had to draft the introduction, acknowledgments, author blurb, and back matter. If I was going to have a professional editor work on this project, I wanted everything edited.

On March 4, I contracted with an editor. I had worked with this editor last year when I coordinated the 15^th Anniversary Anthology of the Northern Virginia Writers Club. I knew the quality of his editing and how to work with this editor, so he seemed to be a logical choice. He worked a lot faster than I did. He sent me edits in sections, but I didn’t have time to review anything until he was finished with the entire manuscript.

Once the words were right, I worked on the other components of the interior. I bought an off the shelf format. It made life much simpler. I simply cut and paste my Word doc into this format. It took care of fonts, space, breaks, etc. Next, I bought a pack of divider designs on Etsy. I found one in a collection of maybe one hundred that looked sci fi-ish. Like with the text format, I simply copied the design I picked and inserted it in many of my stories as a divider between sections rather than use the ole three ellipses. I also bought a pack of 10 ISBNs.

Then it was time to stop avoiding the cover, and time was running out. I first intended to hire a designer but got cold feet. I was short on time and wasn’t confident that I could accurately describe what I was looking for in a cover. Luckily, at the Virginia Writers Club symposium this year, I attended a presentation on how to use the graphic design software Canva. At first, I attempted to create my own design. Realizing my limitations, I licensed a preexisting design. I next asked another Northern Virginia Writers Club member (and president), Michelle McBeth and her husband if they would tweak it. Both had experience with designing the covers for Michelle’s sci fi series. It was a fun process going back and forth tweaking details, and they knew what they were doing. The result was amazing. I love the cover.

The final step was figuring out Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s a three-step process, most of which is straight forward, consisting of entering information and making selections. However, formatting is a nightmare. You upload your manuscript, and KPD re-formats it to how it wants to. Invariably, some things change, some weird things. I went through seven additional versions of my manuscript fixing formatting issues. Some I caught using the KDP digital previewer; others where only caught after I ordered two separate printed proofs. Ordering those was another suggestion of Michelle’s, and a good one.

There you have it. A culmination of a year’s worth of work is now out there. Would I do it again? Yep. I have plenty of short stories and am already thinking about what the next collection should contain.