completely revised, professionally edited and available on Amazon as a Kindle book.

This is exciting! Repatriation, which started as a series of episodes for Christmas 2014, has been completely revised, professionally edited and is available on Amazon as a Kindle book.

Before I tell the story of how (and why) this happened, here’s the link.

Repatriation – a novella of World War 2

The book is only 99 cents, so don’t hesitate to get it!

So how did this happen? A number of weeks ago I wrote about the fact that I have picked an editor for We Never Stood Alone, which will be released in September or October. That edit is going well – I’m working through the details now. 

But the schedule for publishing the full-length novel after the edit is finished is pretty ambitious. I realized a while back that I could make it easier by walking through the process ahead of time with a smaller project. My immediate thought was Repatriation.

My next thought was “I need an editor.” I fully subscribe to the idea that all books need a professional editor. And I had one at hand. Not Catherine Fitzsimmons, who is editing We Never Stood Alone, but Rachel Starr Thompson, who was my second choice for that project by a narrow margin. So I contacted her and contracted a complete structural, copy and proof edit. 

I will confess that I was daunted by the first set of structural comments: “eliminate the first two chapters,” “change the point of view characters.” But I could see the logic in her suggestions, and I figured “if you pay a professional, you should probably take their advice.”

Bottom line: it’s a much better story than it was last Christmas. 

Once the proof edit was done, I began to work step by step through the publishing process. I did not hire a professional cover designer, because it was just not cost effective for such a little book. I will hire one for We Never Stood Alone. And the cover design was painful. Copy permissions are expensive- and also not cost effective for such a little book. 

But the rest was pretty straight-forward, and a great learning curve. I bought ISBN’s, created accounts with Kindle Direct Publishing, Goodreads, Author Central, and CreateSpace. (If all that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry about it.)

The result was an e-book on Amazon this week, and a paperback soon. Please check out the ‘new’ story, and stay tuned for notice of availability for the print version.