The last couple days in publishing my work have both been great and frustrating.

I said a while back that I sold an Article to an online science fiction/fantasy magazine called BuzzyMag but that it may be a while before they actually publish it. Well the wait is over! The article is now live. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” (as Dr. Frankenstein in Universal’s Frankenstein shouts.) It covers one of the newest trends in sci fi and fantasy television: TV series based on books in the two genres. With TV shows like The Expanse, American Godsand The Man In the High Castle, that are all based on best-selling or award-winning books, there are many more TV shows such as these to come in the near-future. I discuss those as well as past and current shows based on novels in my article entitled “TheTop 10 SF/F TV Series Based On Books” at BuzzyMag. Feel free to leave any comments either there or here.

Speaking about publishing, an indie author like myself doesn’t really know or remember how tough self-publishing is until they are actually doing it. Yesterday when I was trying to submit my manuscript for the print edition of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” to Kindle Direct Publishing’s beta Paperback Publishing Program, I was going through a series of file types to get the manuscript to lay out correctly. None of them worked. Amazon suggests submitting manuscripts in PDF formatted files because is more compatible to the publishing program. I had been considering making a PDF version of my manuscript since yesterday afternoon when I started having the submission problems but didn’t have a PDF converter. Or I thought I didn’t.

I tried searching the internet for a free converter that was recommended by articles in well-known tech magazines such as Wiredand PC Mag. Well, it was just this afternoon that I was looking at an article at PCMag.com that suggested Libre Office. I’ve been using Libre Office for typing my stories for the last year or so, ever since Microsoft stopped providing its own Office package with Windows. However, I didn’t know that it had a PDF converter or editing tool until I glanced through that article. I looked on the file menu of the Writer software of my copy of Libre Office and, sure enough, there was an option to convert files to PDF that was labeled “Export as PDF”! I clicked on that with the odt (open document format) file of my manuscript open and it created a PDF copy. Now to see if Kindle’s paperback publishing program will accept the file even if it’s been created by an open source program like Libre. Microsoft Word has seemed to be the standard for everything for the last 20 years.

I’ll update you next time and let you know how the PDF file of my manuscript submission worked out. If next week’s post’s headline reads something like “’Circa Sixty Years’ Print Edition Now Available” then that means it worked out.

Until next time . . .